For the Sun After Long Nights
Published by: Atlantic Books
An extraordinary and deeply moving chronicle of the spirit and legacy of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, as well as the history, geopolitics and influences that led to this pivotal moment.
In September 2022, in response to the death of Mahsa Jîna Amini in police custody, after being arrested and beaten for not wearing her hijab properly, thousands of Iranians – mostly women – took to the streets in one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades.
Despite the threat of imprisonment or death for her work as a journalist, Fatemeh Jamalpour joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran’s religious extremist regime. Meanwhile, Nilo Tabrizy was covering the protests from New York, knowing that spotlighting the brutality of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to her birth country. Though they had only met once, united by sisterhood and shared purpose, Nilo and Fatemeh corresponded constantly as they worked to shed light on what was happening on the ground.
Read an extract from the book here.
Our judges said:
I admire this book for many reasons - chief amongst them its extraordinary bravery. Fatemeh Jamalpour’s reporting from the streets of Iran – written while female protesters were being brutalised and killed all around her – is exactly the kind of courageous, first-hand journalism George Orwell was renowned for. Especially relevant right now given the ongoing Iranian war, the book lays bare the Islamic Republic’s savage repression of women’s rights and its wider assault on basic freedoms. The dual narrative structure works brilliantly, weaving Jamalpour’s raw, on-the-ground accounts with Nilo Tabrizy’s meticulous, desk-based research whilst exiled from her home country.
