I'm Writing You from Tehran: A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Past and Their Country's Future - Hardcover

Minoui, Delphine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374175225 ISBN 13: 9780374175221

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019

Synopsis

A lucid, moving view into an often obscured part of our world, exploring notions of democracy, identity, and the resilience of the human spirit

In the wake of losing her beloved grandfather, Delphine Minoui decided to visit Iran for the first time since the revolution. It was 1998. She was twenty-two and a freshly minted journalist. She would stay for ten years.

Quickly absorbed into the everyday life of the city, Minoui attends secret dance parties that are raided by the morality police and dines in the home of a young couple active in the Basij―the fearsome militia. She befriends veteran journalists battling government censorship, imprisoned student poets, and her own grandmother (a woman who is discovering the world of international affairs through her contraband satellite TV).

And so it is all the more crushing when the political situation falters. Minoui joins street protests teeming with students hungry for change and is interrogated by the secret police; she sees a mirrored rise in the love of country―the yearning patriotism of the left, the militant nationalism of the right. Friends disappear; others may be tracking her movements. She finds love, loses her press credentials, marries, and is separated from her husband by erupting global conflict. Through it all, her love for Iran and its people deepens. In her family’s past she discovers a mission that will shape her entire future.

Framed as a letter to her grandfather and filled with disarming characters in momentous times, I’m Writing You from Tehran is a remarkable blend of global history, family memoir, and the making of a reporter, told by someone both insider and outsider―a child of the diaspora who is a world-class political journalist.

About this title

About the Author

Delphine Minoui, a recipient of the Albert-Londres Prize for her reporting on Iraq and Iran, is a journalist and Middle East correspondent for Le Figaro. She is the author of several books in French. I'm Writing You from Tehran is her first book translated into English.

Born in Paris in 1974 to a French mother and an Iranian father, she now lives in Istanbul.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374175225
• ISBN 13: 9780374175221
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320