What matters to you.
0:00
0:00
NEXT UP:
 
Top

Forum Network

Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:

The Lonely War: One Woman’s Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran

In partnership with:
Date and time
Tuesday, January 13, 2015

In the summer of 2009, as she was covering the popular uprisings in Tehran for the New York Times, Nazila Fathi received a phone call. “They have given your photo to snipers,” a government source warned her. Soon after, with undercover agents closing in, Fathi fled the country with her husband and two children, beginning a life of exile. In _The Lonely War_, Fathi interweaves her story with that of the country she left behind, showing how Iran is locked in a battle between hardliners and reformers that dates back to the country’s 1979 revolution. Drawing on over two decades of reporting and extensive interviews with both ordinary Iranians and high-level officials before and since her departure, Fathi describes Iran’s awakening alongside her own, revealing how moderates are steadily retaking the country.

Fathi_Nazila_Hassan_Sarbakhshian_-_NEW.jpg
**Nazila Fathi** is a journalist, translator, and commentator on Iran who reported out of the country for nearly two decades until 2009, when threats from the Iranian government forced her into exile. From 2001 to 2009, Fathi was based in Tehran as the only full-time \_New York Times\_ correspondent in Iran, writing over 2,000 articles; prior to that, she wrote for \_TIME\_ magazine, and \_Agence France-Presses\_. Her writing has also appeared in the \_New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy,\_ and \_Nieman Reports\_. Fathi is the translator of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi’s book \_History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran\_, and has been interviewed on CNN, BBC, CBC, and NPR. She received her MA in political science from the University of Toronto in 2001 and is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Raoul Wallenberg Fellowship at Lund University, a Nieman Fellowship for journalism at Harvard University, a Shorenstein Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, and she was an associate at the Harvard Belfer Center. [Follow Nazila Fathi on Twitter](https://twitter.com/nazilafathi "Nazila Fathi")
Explore: