Zarah Ghahramani
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zarah Ghahramani (Persian: زاراە قهرمانی) is an Iranian-born Kurdish[1] author living in Australia who wrote My Life as a Traitor, an award-winning memoir of her imprisonment and torture in Evin Prison.
Ghahramani was born and raised in Tehran, Iran in 1981 as the daughter of a Kurdish father who was a military officer under the Shah of Iran, and a mother who raised Ghahramani in the Zoroastrian faith.[2] Because Ghahramani's family strongly disagreed with the country's conservative rulers,[3] she was politically active from an early age. However, her "rage at the government was a matter of personal style as much as of principle," resulting from the "dos and don'ts" of the life she was expected to live under.[4]
Arrest and imprisonment
When Ghahramani was a 20-year-old college student at the University of Tehran, she was involved in student politics. After a period of political activism that displeased the Iranian authorities, she was arrested and imprisoned in the infamous Evin prison.[5] Charged with "inciting crimes against the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran,"[6] Ghahramani was beaten, interrogated and locked in solitary confinement. At the end of her 30-day sentence, she was released.
Because Ghahraman was at risk of being arrested again, the writer Robert Hillman helped her to escape the country.[7] She currently lives in Australia.
