In this episode Gabrielle discusses Nasrin Parvaz. Gabrielle is a final year English student. She is a student journalist with us on a placement organised by the Oxford University Career Services. This article was edited using the ChatGPT.
🎧 listen to Gabrielle’s backstory here - he discusses her motivation & research as well.
Gabrielle also wrote a short article about Nasrin Paryaz with a summary inforgraphic - A quick 2 minute read.
Nasrin Parvaz is an activist, writer and artist born in Tehran. She is known for bravely speaking out about her experiences of torture and solitude. She experienced while imprisoned for protesting the ‘gender apartheid’ under the Islamic Regime.
Parvaz’ story is a devastating but inspiring one. Which she tells in her 2002 prison memoir. One Woman’s Struggle in Iran. In which she details her return from England in 1979. Where she had been studying. To post-revolutionary Iran to become a woman’s rights activist. Just three years later, aged 23, she was arrested. After the betrayal of a comrade and spent 8 years imprisoned, blindfolded and cramped. This is not to mention the brutal beatings she endured. Sometimes left paralysed for weeks. Or the occasion on which a guard hit her head against a wall so hard she developed a brain tumour . This tumor still troubles her still, thirty years later.
She continues her activism to this day. She speaks out loudly for her home country in articles written for publications like The Guardian and The Times. Additionally, she has spoken for organisations such as Amnesty International. The Medical Foundation. Edinburgh International Book Festival. And, Ledbury Poetry Festival. Parvaz has continued to write and translate her own and others’ poetry. Such as the impactful and anonymous Dear Fahimeh, as well as short stories. One of which, A war against womanhood. Went forth to win the “Women’s World Award” in 2003 while various others were shortlisted.
Parvaz ends this short story with hope. Hope, that each woman and each man help fight the ‘war against womanhood’. By never ceasing to resist and together ‘put our hands together and demand the equality. Equality of all boys and girls, of all women and men, now and forever around the globe.’
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