Karl Fleming interviews Azar Nafisi on Kentucky Author Forum Presents.

Karl Fleming interviews Azar Nafisi on Kentucky Author Forum Presents.

Azar Nafisi on Kentucky Author Forum Presents

A veil of oppression covered Iran after the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Azar Nafisi, who describes the degrading repression and suffocating loss of freedoms during this period in Iran in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, speaks about her experiences on the next Kentucky Author Forum airing Sunday, May 22 at 10/9 p.m. CT on KET1. Nafisi is interviewed by author and journalist Karl Fleming.

Now teaching at Johns Hopkins University, Nafisi was educated in Switzerland, England and the U.S. and taught Western literature at universities in Tehran from 1979 until 1995, when she was fired for refusing to wear a veil. Enduring this period of fervent anti-Westernism, Nafisi resisted the efforts of her country to retreat to the 6th century and the time of the prophet Muhammad.

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi led a reading group in her house for seven of her former students. Risking jail or worse, the women found release and hope in their two hours together on Thursday mornings. Discussing the classic but forbidden works of Austin, Fitzgerald, James, and Nabokov, their lives became intertwined with the stories they read.

Outside this world of fiction and ideas, Iranian women could seldom relax from the daily ordeals of reprimands for eating fruit "too suggestively" or allowing a strand of hair to escape from a head scarf. Disobeying the "rules" could lead to jail, flogging, fines, or even rape and execution.

Karl Fleming, raised in the American South, was introduced to the brutalities of racial politics during an early newspaper job. A subsequent posting as Newsweek's lead civil rights reporter took him to the South's hot spots throughout the 1960s. His memoir, Son of the Rough South , will be published this year.

Kentucky Author Forum Presents: A Conversation with Azar Nafisi is a KET production. The producer-director is Duncan Hart; Nancy Carpenter serves as executive producer. The author's appearance in Louisville was produced by the Kentucky Author Forum, (Mary Moss Greenebaum, producer), and sponsored by the University of Louisville, in partnership with Brown-Forman and The Humana Foundation. The program is closed-captioned for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Viewers can find out more about programming on KET's six digital channels by visiting the KET Web site at www.ket.org.