Fariba Hachtroudi

Fariba Hachtroudi is a French writer and Iranian exile born in Tehran in 1951, and the daughter of the eminent mathematician and champion of democracy Moschen Hachtroudi. She studied art and archaeology in France, moving there when she was a teenager. Despite the distance from her homeland, the Islamic revolution in Iran left her feeling bewildered.

In 1983, she denounced Khomeini’s regime in newspaper articles. This earned her a fatwa which called for her death. In 1985, she illegally entered Iran, a journey she described in L’Exilée (published by Payot in 1985), and she became reconciled with her homeland. She found a country at war, struggling with intolerance and obscurantism. Fariba Hachtroudi wrote several novels, essays and articles “to exorcise this reality”. She led the humanitarian association MoHa, and was active within the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Since 1990, Hachtroudi has been working with the photographer Laurent Péters; they jointly won the Sicilian Cultural Report prize in 2002. Fariba Hachtroudi divides her time between her work as a writer, as a journalist, and as a lecturer working all around the world.

Following her residency, she published the novel La Gelée Royale.

Website: https://www.faribahachtroudi.fr/