How two women writers portray Iran in International Booker Prize-longlisted novels

The novella by Parsipur, now in her 80s and living in exile in Northern California, was originally published in 1989 and banned in Iran for its bold exploration of women’s sexuality, but it feels as urgent today as it did then. Translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh, it’s a slim but potent book that follows five women from diverse backgrounds who escape the suffocating grip of patriarchal society and converge in a mystical garden near Tehran. Set against the backdrop of the 1953 coup d’état, a real historical event that saw the US-backed overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the story combines realism with magical elements, creating a dreamlike critique of Iranian life.

Iran: A place of beauty and brutality

“Women Without Men has a powerful and paradoxical arc that traverses various notions of opposites: magic/realism, nature/culture, local/universal, men/women, mystical/political. Shahrnush situates the city of Tehran as a point of entry to all sorts of cultural, sociopolitical, and historical realities, while the orchard functions purely on a metaphoric level. Not unlike the Garden of Eden, this orchard becomes a utopian island, a place of exile where women may take refuge, as long as they respect its rules. When in the city of Tehran, fully conscious of time and place, we delve into a specific country’s cultural and collective political crisis. But once inside the orchard, we abandon all logic of time and place, and face the deeply existential and personal crisis of a few women,” writes Iranian-American photographer and visual artist Shirin Neshat in her Foreword.

Parsipur’s women are flawed, desperate, and driven by desires that society deems taboo. Mahdokht is a schoolteacher who, shocked by a man’s casual invitation to a movie, quits her job and eventually plants herself in the garden to become a tree, literally rooting herself in nature as a form of rebellion against human constraints. Faizeh, a young woman, is obsessed with marrying her friend’s brother, only to confront the harsh realities of male indifference. Munis, killed by her brother for defying him, resurrects herself as a higher being with supernatural knowledge, which symbolises a transcendence over death and oppression. Zarrinkolah, a prostitute who starts seeing her clients as headless, represents the dehumanisation of women in sexual transactions. And Farrokhlaqa, a middle-aged housewife fed up with her husband’s abuse, seeks refuge in the garden’s serenity.

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What strikes me most about Parsipur’s approach is how she uses magical realism as a tool to amplify the absurdities of real-life oppression. In Iran during the 1950s, women’s lives were (and often still are) dictated by men: brothers, husbands, fathers. Parsipur doesn’t shy away from the violence; one character is beaten to death, another has to cope with marital rape. But in the garden, a utopian space without men, these women find agency. They work the land, share stories, and transform: Mahdokht literally becomes a tree, dispersing seeds of change. It’s a feminist allegory, drawing on Islamic mysticism and Persian folklore, where the garden evokes paradise but it’s a paradise reclaimed by women. Parsipur writes of Iran as a place of beauty and brutality, where political chaos (the coup raging in Tehran) mirrors the personal upheavals in women’s lives. Her own history reflects this: imprisoned multiple times for her writing, she fled Iran after the book’s publication, facing harassment that forced her into exile. In her prose, we see Iran emerge not merely as a monolithic theocracy, but also as a layered society where women’s desires clash with rigid norms, where revolution is both political and personal.

The quests for freedom

In her debut novel, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, Bazyar, who was born in Germany to Iranian parents and is now in her late thirties, offers a different lens: a multi-generational family saga translated from German by Ruth Martin, who has previously translated writers like Hannah Arendt, Joseph Roth and Volker Weidermann. Spanning four decades from 1979 to 2009, it traces the lives of a family displaced by the Iranian Revolution. Unlike Parsipur’s mystical brevity, Bazyar’s narrative is polyphonic, with each section voiced by a different family member, with a decade separating them each, building a mosaic of exile’s long shadow.

The story kicks off in 1979 Tehran with Behzad, a young communist revolutionary exhilarated by the Shah’s ousting: “Shah has gone, and we’re at the beginning of a new age, a new system, a new freedom for which we are now preparing ourselves. What remains is the turmoil on the streets, still euphoric, but a little less so with each passing week. What remains are the meetings of our movement, the plans, the pamphlets, the teaching units, the guerrilla exercises. They may once have been secret, but now they are ever more public, and we are ever more certain of victory — though sometimes our mood is more reflective, and sometimes more radical, and always with one eye on those people who also call themselves revolutionaries, but are religious with it. The real revolution, however, is still to come: the people’s revolution in the institutions. All that has happened so far is just the first step. Long live socialism, long live our homeland, our pearl, our Iran.”

Behzad, as you can sense from the paragraph quoted above, is all fire and idealism, organising secret meetings and falling in love with Nahid, a fellow activist. But as the Islamic Republic consolidates power, cracking down on leftists, the couple flees to West Germany with their children. The narrative then jumps to 1989, where Nahid grapples with the isolation of immigrant life, glued to the radio for news from Iran while raising Laleh and Morad. By 1999, teenage Laleh visits Tehran, overwhelmed by its sensory chaos (the noisy days contrasting the quiet nights, for example) while confronting her hybrid identity. In 2009, Morad, the son, wrestles with inherited trauma in Germany, his numbness a shield against his parents’ unending grief. An epilogue ties it all together, reflecting on return and loss.

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Bazyar sees Iran through the prism of absence and memory. For the older generation, it’s a lost paradise of revolutionary hope turned sour; for the kids, it’s a distant myth, coloured by parental stories and fleeting visits. The novel captures the generational rift: Behzad and Nahid’s activism fades into mundane exile — jobs in factories, cultural clashes in Germany — while their children navigate racism and rootlessness. Iran here is both homeland and haunting; silent nights symbolise suppressed voices under the regime, but also the eerie silence of displacement. Bazyar, drawing from her own background, infuses the story with subtle critiques of Western perceptions of Iran — refugees as perpetual outsiders — and the internal conflicts of diaspora life. Women’s freedom is threaded throughout: Nahid’s revolutionary spirit dims in domestic drudgery, Laleh chafes against bodily expectations in Tehran. But unlike Parsipur’s direct confrontation with sexuality, Bazyar explores it through intergenerational lenses, showing how revolution’s failures ripple into personal freedoms denied.

Comparing the two, both authors centre women in narratives of resistance. Parsipur’s magical garden and Bazyar’s quiet nights both evoke spaces of reflection amid chaos, highlighting the dual nature of exile: physical and emotional. Revolution looms large — 1953 for Parsipur, 1979 for Bazyar — as turning points where hope gives way to repression. But there are differences, too: Parsipur’s style is fable-like, concise, and surreal, challenging stereotypes by portraying a spiritual, non-religious Iran where women transcend patriarchy through fantasy. Bazyar’s is grounded, expansive, and realistic, focusing on the mundane pains of migration and how political trauma scars families across borders. Parsipur writes from inside the system she fled, her voice defiant and intimate; Bazyar, from the diaspora, writes from the perspective of someone outside the system. Their works, ultimately, are about universal quests for autonomy and freedom in the face of oppression.