Roya hakakian biography

Is an Iranian American Jewish journalist, lecturer, and writer.
ROYA HAKAKIAN is a writer whose work often deals with the topics of exile, displacement, political and religious persecution, and the struggle of people.
A passionate, committed Iranian citizen with dreams of becoming a writer, Hakakian became a political exile at 19, fleeing to the United States.

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Roya Hakakian

Roya Hakakian is an Iranian American writer, journalist, and public speaker. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in leading English language publications including the New York Times, New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic. A founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, she has spoken on a variety of news outlets, from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS to MSNBC, as well as in Washington D.C. for the U.S. Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and the State Department with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken. Her latest book, A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious, has been called a contemporary Tocquevillian account by The Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prizes and has been called one of “the most important activists, academics and journalists of her generation.”

Hakakian is the author of two collections of poetry in Persian and is listed among the leading new voices in Persia

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Roya Hakakian

Iranian American author

Roya Hakakian (Persian: رویا حکاکیان; born 1966) is an Iranian American Jewish journalist, lecturer, and writer. Born in Iran, she came to the United States as a refugee and is now a naturalized citizen. She is the author of several books, including an acclaimed memoir in English called Journey from the Land of No (Crown), Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic), and A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf).

Deeply influenced by both the longstanding literary traditions of her birth country and its historical turmoils, Roya Hakakian often draws her inspirations from highly political subjects and treats them with lyricism. She takes on the most pressing and difficult contemporary sociopolitical issues —exile, persecution, censorship— and injects them with relevance and urgency through her deeply observant and poetic sensibility to make these subjects accessible to all readers.

Biography

Hakakian was born and raised in a Jewish family in Tehran.^[1] She was barely a tee

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ROYA HAKAKIAN is a writer whose work often deals with the topics of exile, displacement, political and religious persecution, and the struggle of people, especially women, against authoritarianism. Her memoir, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown, 2005) details the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in her birth country in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. The book quickly captured the attention of readers and reviewers alike and was Barnes & Noble’s Pick of the Week, Ms. Magazine Must Read of the Summer, Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year, Elle Magazine’s Best Nonfiction of the year, and the Best Memoir by the Connecticut Center for the Book and has been translated into several languages including German, Dutch, and Spanish. In 2008, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction.

Her second book, Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic, 2011), is the account of the 1992 murders of four Iranian-Kurdish leaders in Berlin, Germany, its investigation, and the four-year trial and historic judgment th