Azar Nafisi, author: Iranians are fighting for their freedom

'What the regime does to women is even if they don't kill us, when you stop a woman from being herself, stop her from speaking the way she wants to or stop her from connecting, it’s a kind of murder. And so we're fighting for our existence. We're fighting our survival.’

Svetlana Reiter speaks to the Iranian-American writer, Azar Nafisi, about the current instability in the country of her birth as Iranians continue to seek regime change in Tehran.

Born in Tehran in 1956, the story of her life has been greatly shaped by the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, when Nafisi taught English literature at the University of Tehran. She was expelled from the University for not wearing a hijab, and eventually left for the US less than two decades later.

Nafisi is best-known for her New York Times bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which she wrote about her experiences under the Islamic regime. The book focuses on a short period before she left Iran in 1997, when she would gather a group of young women at her house one morning every week to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature.

Thank you to the BBC Russian Service for their help in making this programme.

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Presenter: Svetlana Reiter

Producers: Anastasia Soroka and Ben Cooper

Editor: Damon Rose

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(Image: Azar Nafisi Credit: Massimo Valicchia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)