Nasim Nazari

Nasim Nazari was 18 years old the first time she was arrested. The crime was to blog about the Islamic Republic's abuses against the left, including Khomeini's targeted killings of thousands of political opponents in 1988.

The negative attention from the authorities continued as she began studying sociology at Tehran's top university. Among other things, she went on strike against the mandate for hijab for women, and participated in hunger strikes for political prisoners. As a result, she was refused further doctoral studies, even though she had top marks at both the Bachelor and Master level.

Her master's thesis was a feminist-oriented study of infidelity. The aim was to shed light on the situation of women in marriage, and to uncover harmful effects of men's dominant role in Iranian society. Nazari based the task on in-depth interviews with both men and women. She revealed how myths, literature and religion play together to strengthen men's power. According to her, the professors at the university opposed her. When she gathered the research in a book, the authorities censored and banned it. She self-published it on Amazon, but it is now unavailable due to Amazon's boycott of Persian texts. Nasim Nazari has also studied the significance of religions for gender inequality in society, and looked in particular at Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism.

For the past ten years, she has been associated with various Iranian study centres where she has taught women's rights and gender equality. In 2015, she joined a network that worked to get women into politics. Again, she was arrested, questioned, and placed under surveillance.

In 2019, she co-founded a think tank in Tehran for feminism and Marxist studies, called the Athens Institute. The government reprimanded them, and shut down the institute after raids by the security forces.

Over the past year, Nazari has been working on a series of short stories about the living conditions in a capitalist world.

Nasim Nazari came to Skien in November 2020 together with her husband Masoud Ghadim Fallah. Both are today the city's ICORN writers. Fallah is also an author and sociologist of literature, and together they recently completed the manuscript for a systematic review in Persian of Henrik Ibsen's plays, their conceptual basis and underlying critique of political economy.