When in 1989 Shahrnush Parsipur published Women Without Men, a magical realist novella challenging the sexual and social repressions of women in Iran, she had already spent nearly five years in an Islamic Republic prison. The authorities banned the book, but copies passed privately between Iranian readers and, over decades, it travelled around the world, surviving censorship and its author’s further imprisonment and exile.
What made it such a powerful and deeply subversive work, and Parsipur, who has died aged 80, one of post-revolutionary Iran’s most vital literary voices, was its feminist take on women’s right to autonomy over their own bodies, particularly under the Islamic Republic’s gender apartheid regime.
In the story, five women struggling with domineering men and anxieties over sex and virginity escape to a garden outside Tehran. The women are not perfect; they are frightened, vain, fallible and often funny. And the garden does not free them permanently from men. But it does give them a mystical space to rethink the roles through which they have always understood themselves and their bodies. One woman escapes her brother’s control by jumping from a rooftop and continues narrating after death, another fears sex so intensely she transforms into a tree.
In 2009, Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari adapted Women Without Men for the screen, winning a Silver Lion for best director at the Venice film festival. And in March this year, Penguin published Faridoun Farrokh’s new translation of Parsipur’s groundbreaking novella in the UK. It was longlisted for the 2026 International Booker prize and provided some background as Iranian women took to the streets in the Women, Life, Freedom movement of the 2020s.
For decades before they stripped off their hijabs in front of the “morality police”, these women had passed Parsipur’s banned books between them, recognising in each small act of refusal their own shame, fear and imposed limitations, and launching a nationwide conversation about who gets to control women’s bodies.
I interviewed Parsipur for the Guardian just before the publication of the new translation. At 80, she was wry, funny and still informed on broader Iranian politics, though much less so on the changing sexual dynamics among Iranian youth. She saw the forthcoming publication as a chance to speak to this new generation of modern Iranian women.
She recalled that, after Women Without Men was published in Iran in 1989, the wife of a senior Islamic Republic official denounced it as anti-Islamic because it spoke openly about virginity – simply that, she said, nothing else. The mere discussion of virginity was enough to make the book unacceptable to her. Parsipur insisted that the novel was not an attack on Islam but on ignorance and shame. She was delighted by the memory of a young reader who said that Women Without Men had shown her that losing her virginity did not mean losing her future.
Born in Tehran, Shahrnush was the daughter of Ali Parsipur, a lawyer, and Fakhr-ol-Moluk Vala, a homemaker. She spent part of her childhood in Khorramshahr and began writing while young, publishing a children’s story, The Little Red Ball, in 1969. She published her first novel, The Dog and the Long Winter, in 1974, about a young woman who, after her brother’s illness, challenges the patriarchal restrictions placed on women.
In 1967 Parsipur married the film-maker Nasser Taghvai. They had a son, Ali, separated in 1973, and divorced the following year. After graduating in sociology from the University of Tehran in 1973, she worked as a television producer, including on the weekly programme Rural Women. Under the shah, she resigned in protest after two dissident poet-journalists were tortured and executed by the secret police. She was then arrested and charged for opposing the government.
In the late 1970s Parsipur studied Chinese language and philosophy in Paris. She returned after the 1979 revolution, but in 1981 was detained without formal charge for four years and seven months under the false pretext that she had illegal papers in her car. She wrote about that time in Prison Memoir (1996), part of which appeared in English in 2013 as Kissing the Sword. A complete English edition is scheduled for publication next year.
In 1989, as well as Women Without Men, she published Touba and the Meaning of Night, which follows one woman through the political and social upheavals of 20th-century Iran. It was also banned. A British edition is scheduled for 2028. Her later books include Blue Logos, Shiva (a lengthy political science fiction novel) and Tea Ceremony in the Presence of the Wolf.
Parsipur left Iran in 1994 and settled in northern California. In 2003 she became the first recipient of Brown University’s International Writers Project fellowship, and in 2010 Brown awarded her an honorary doctorate. She also received a Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammett award from the Fund for Free Expression.
But her impact has reached far beyond literary circles and her native Iran.
With her fiction and prison writing, she has given readers around the world a way into the intimate machinery of gender repression: not only the laws enforced by the state, but the ideas about honour, purity and obedience carried within families and absorbed by women themselves.
In her later years Parsipur largely stopped writing. Exile had freed her from censorship but separated her from the daily life from which her stories came. “I can’t write a California story,” she told me. She continued to read Persian literature, play bridge and celebrate the spring new year festival Nowruz. And she remained certain that Iranian women were changing the country by living beyond the state’s rules: refusing the compulsory hijab, supporting themselves by working, and entering relationships outside official marriage. “The women of Iran will cause the fall of the Islamic Republic,” she told me. They had “changed so much, so many without hijab. They don’t care what the Islamic Republic thinks”.
She is survived by her son, Ali, a brother, Shahbaz, and a sister, Miryam.
• Shahrnush Parsipur, author, born 17 February 1946; died 3 July 2026
