Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French contemporary graphic novelist, illustrator, animated film director, and children's book author. Apart from her native language Persian, she speaks English, Swedish, German, French and Italian. Satrapi grew up in Tehran in a family which was involved with communist and socialist movements in Iran prior to the Iranian Revolution. She attended the Lycée Français there and witnessed, as a child, the growing suppression of civil liberties and the everyday-life consequences of Iranian politics, including the fall of the Shah, the early regime of... Ruhollah Khomeini, and the first years of the Iran–Iraq War. She experienced an Iraqi air raid and Scud missile attacks on Tehran. According to Persepolis, one Scud hit the house next to hers, killing her friend. Satrapi's family are of distant Iranian Azerbaijani ancestry and are descendants of Nasser al-Din Shah, Shah of Persia from 1848 until 1896. Satrapi said that "But you have to know the kings of the Qajar dynasty, they had hundreds of wives. They made thousands of kids.
more