Shahrnush Parsipur: ‘The women of Iran will cause the
fall of the Islamic Republic’
Written by Dina Nayeri
Published date: 15 Mar 2026
Reported date: 27 Mar 2026
As her banned 1989 novella, Women Without Men, is published for the first
time in the UK, the Iranian author looks back on a life of resistance and
repression.
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.
