Marina Nemat

1 April 2009David McCarthy

On Wednesday 15th April, Marina Nemat will speak in the Killy Theatre to Brentwood students about her experiences under the Iranian regime that gave rise to the book "Prisoner of Tehran": an account of the harrowing conditions she endured throughout the Iranian revolution. Marina Nemat was born in 1965 in Tehran, Iran. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, she was arrested at the age of sixteen and spent more than two years in Evin, a political prison in Tehran, where she was tortured and came very close to execution. She came to Canada in 1991 and has called it home ever since. In 2005, she was a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards in the creative non-fiction category, and in 2006, she produced a documentary Walls like Snakes for CBC Radio. Her memoirs of her life in Iran, Prisoner of Tehran, was published in Canada by Penguin Canada in April 2007, has so far been published in 23 other countries, and has been an international bestseller. MacLean’s Magazine has called it “…one of the finest (memoirs) ever written by a Canadian,” and The New York Times has called it “…a gripping personal history…”. On December 15, 2007, Marina Nemat received the inaugural Human Dignity Award from the European Parliament. She has been offered a fellowship at University of Toronto’s Massey College, where she begins working on her new project in June 2008 which is about the effects of torture on children.

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