As I write this, Iranians around the world are holding their breath for the end of the murderous Islamic Republic. More than three years after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement began, amid renewed demonstrations, brutal state crackdowns and now US bombing raids, Shahrnush Parsipur’s banned novella Women Without Men arrives in the UK, where last month it was longlisted for the 2026 International Booker prize.
At 80 years old, Parsipur is one of Iran’s most celebrated living writers, and one of our boldest, most original feminists. In the 1980s, her stories were the talk of Iran’s literary circles and she was imprisoned for nearly five years, without ever being formally charged.
Three years after her release, in 1989, she published the novel, Touba and the Meaning of Night, and Women Without Men. These books became an underground success, passed around by Iranian women, and soon Women Without Men fell into the hands of the wife of an Islamic Republic official. Parsipur was arrested and imprisoned again, for her depictions of women’s bodies and sexuality.
Set in Tehran during the 1953 coup, Women Without Men blends magical realism and old-school Iranian allegory to condemn the policing of women’s bodies through the stories of five women: Munis, who escapes her brother’s control by jumping from a rooftop and continues narrating after death; pious Faezeh, whose rape shatters her faith; Zarrin, a sex worker who begins seeing her clients as faceless and flees; Mahdokht, who fears sex so intensely she transforms into a tree; and Farrokhlaqa, who leaves her middle-class husband and buys a garden outside the city. The women converge at Farrokhlaqa’s garden, creating a temporary refuge from marriage, male control and sexual shame.
Though it is still banned in Iran, Women Without Men has been translated into many languages, and made into a film in 2009. “It found its place in the world,” Parsipur tells me in a video call from California, where she has lived in exile since the mid-90s. I speak to her just days before US and Israeli bombs fall across Iran. Her English is limited, so we speak in Farsi. My Farsi is conversational, not literary or political. Often I stop to look up words. After five minutes, she starts to call me “my dear”. I try to ask about her experience in prison but clumsily say, “How was prison?” She laughs and says, “It was great. Prison’s always great.” I like her immediately.
I ask if writing the book was worth the personal cost – the danger to her life and freedom. “The Islamic Republic wanted to scare and punish me,” she says. “Mrs K, the wife of the Islamic Republic official, said that the book was anti-Islamic. The book is not anti-Islamic. Her problem was that there was a part of the book about virginity.”
She returns, again and again to that one word: bekarat – virginity. I ask if she thinks that’s all the arrest was about and she says yes, that was all: virginity was a taboo topic. The rest, she says, could have happened anywhere. I disagree, but I think she’s hedging, still afraid of what the Islamic Republic might do to her in exile, in her old age. I tell her that, yes, the underlying female desire to be free from male needs and male desire, these things are indeed universal. And it’s no wonder that the book was so well received abroad.
She brings us back to bekarat. “It has a deep meaning for Iranians,” she explains. “It shows that this woman hasn’t been with others. This is so strong in Iran. My grandmother would tell me a non-virgin woman will go to hell.” She tells me that when she was young she examined her body and started to believe that she’d already lost her virginity because nobody explained the difference between the labia and vagina. “They wouldn’t tell anything to girls. I suffered for so long thinking I’m not a virgin, so I decided to write this book so other girls don’t suffer.”
“It’s so important for women,” she continues. “For years we ready them to be with just one man. My mother has told me similar stories. My maternal grandmother, who was born around the same time as Parsipur, was married at 13 and didn’t know what sex was on her wedding night. At 14, she went to the doctor thinking she had stomach worms, and was told she was six months pregnant.
I ask if her mother contributed to this shame around womanhood. “No,” she says, her mother was modern, didn’t wear a chador. “Once I told her that I didn’t think I was a virgin, she said, ‘No problem, you can work, have a life, be a person.’ There was no pressure. I wasn’t harassed like women in religious families who can lose their lives, be killed by their brothers.”
The pressure came from everywhere else. Grandmothers, aunts, the wider society, and especially men. “Every man wants to be first. English men, too. American men. They don’t want comparison. They don’t want you to say this one was better, that one was more delicate.” When I suggest that this isn’t true of modern men, she says flatly, “It’s universal.” Then she adds: “They tell you always, if a woman is not virgin, she is finished. But my mother took that worry away.” Did she help her sister, 13 years younger, understand her body? “In Iran lots of things had changed by the time she was born,” Parsipur says. “Women had more freedoms. She had it easier.”
Parsipur tells me that she doesn’t know if anyone in her family read her books. They were just upset that she was in prison. “They tried so hard to free me. But the writing itself wasn’t important for them.” I ask if this was painful as an artist, and she says it wasn’t. “I was up against society and society received me. People loved the books. One woman told me that Women Without Men saved her. She was suffering so much from not being a virgin. After she read it, she was so happy. She realised it’s not that important; that her life will pass without her virginity; that marriage is possible without virginity.”
I push back on the idea that virginity is still a big issue for young women in Iran. “Even younger women don’t make relationships with men so easily,” she counters. “If she has many men in her life, people call her names. Women have been trained to think that, if they have sex, they are different from other women.” But things are changing. Some, she admits, “try to get a job so they can be independent, work, run their own lives”. She points to the rise of “white marriages,” couples living together without formal registration. “It’s normal now,” she says. “The Islamic Republic doesn’t know. Nobody checks. It’s not because divorce is hard. They want their personal independence.”
For the past 20 years, Parsipur has lived in an Iranian community near San Francisco. She rarely speaks English, plays bridge, celebrates the Persian new year (Nowruz) with a traditional haft-sin spread. “I don’t see anyone but Iranians,” she tells me. And, for the last four or five years, she’s stopped writing. “The thoughts and ideas I had are fading. I’m not in Iran, so I can’t write something new. I’ve written all my stories already. I can’t write a California story.”
About the current protests, Parsipur says, “The women of Iran have changed so much, so many without hijab. They don’t care what the Islamic Republic thinks.” She pauses. “The women of Iran will cause the fall of the Islamic Republic.” One day.
• Women Without Men will be published by Penguin on 26 March. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Dina Nayeri’s third novel A Happy Death will be published in 2027.
