Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French creator whose graphic novel sequence “Persepolis” launched hundreds of thousands of readers to the struggles of regular Iranians within the turbulent years across the Islamic Revolution, has died at 56.
The workplace of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, introduced her demise on Thursday in a press release, which didn’t specify the place, when or how she died.
“Her passing marks the lack of a number one determine in French tradition and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a common message and earned her immense worldwide acclaim,” the presidency stated in its assertion.
After the publication of “Persepolis” greater than 20 years in the past, Ms. Satrapi grew to become one of many best-known exponents of an ascendant type of graphic novel that mixed political historical past and memoir. Its protagonist, Marji, was depicted dwelling by way of a number of the most troublesome years of Iranian historical past, carefully mirroring Ms. Satrapi’s life.
Each the creator and her character have been born in Iran in 1969. Each have been about 10 when the Shah was overthrown. Each lived by way of the rise of the clerics and the horror of the Iran-Iraq struggle, and each left Iran at age 14 to attempt to research in Austria.
Ms. Satrapi moved in 1994 to Paris, the place she wrote the “Persepolis” sequence. The primary quantity was published in English in 2003, with the second volume launched in English a yr later.
Tens of millions of readers purchased the books, that are among the many most internationally well-known works exploring the inside worlds of recent Iranians.
Some 20 years later, Ms. Satrapi set to work documenting and explaining one other tumultuous second in Iranian historical past — the unrest in 2022 that adopted the demise in police custody of a 22-year-old Kurdish lady named Mahsa Amini. Ms. Amini had been detained by Iran’s morality police, accused of violating a regulation requiring ladies to put on the hijab in public.
Ladies tore off their veils throughout Iran, in some of the important cultural and political moments in Iran because the 1979 revolution.
Ms. Satrapi’s work on that second culminated in 2024 with the discharge of “Girl, Life, Freedom,” another graphic work of nonfiction. She contributed some drawings, however told The New York Times that she was extra of a “director” of the undertaking, which additionally featured work from different artists, activists, lecturers and journalists.
“Even primary human rights, they deny us,” she said of the Iranian regime after the ebook was launched. “You don’t have the appropriate to bounce, you don’t have the appropriate to sing, you don’t have the appropriate to do that, you don’t have the appropriate to do this.”
Ms. Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran, close to the Caspian Sea, and grew up in Tehran. After her education in Austria, she studied artwork in each Tehran and Strasbourg earlier than shifting to Paris in 1994, in accordance with the French presidency.
“I like dwelling there as a result of I can smoke in every single place, however it’s going to change,” she said in 2007, across the time that smoking was banned in lots of public areas in France, and two years after she revealed an illustrated ode to smoking in The Instances.
Perhaps, she mused in 2007, she would transfer to Greece, which had but to introduce such stringent restrictions on smoking.
That yr, Ms. Satrapi achieved wider consideration by way of the movie model of “Persepolis,” which gained international acclaim and several other notable prizes, together with on the Cannes Movie Pageant.
Ms. Satrapi additionally wrote a number of youngsters’s books and graphic novels, together with “Hen with Plums,” the story of the demise of her great-uncle, which was additionally became a movie.
One other of her works, “Embroideries,” depicted Iranian ladies discussing love, intercourse and males over afternoon tea.
Although she created a number of the best-known works within the style, Ms. Satrapi told The Times in 2007 that she by no means preferred the time period “graphic novel.”
“I feel they made up this time period for the bourgeoisie to not be frightened of comics,” she stated. “Like, ‘Oh, that is the type of comics you possibly can learn.’”
She additionally gained acclaim as a painter and was elected in 2024 to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, one of many highest honors within the French artwork world.
Ms. Satrapi wrote steadily about her perpetual sense of dislocation — dwelling away from Iran, however considering consistently of her house nation.
“I name Iran house as a result of irrespective of how lengthy I reside in France, and even if I really feel additionally French in any case these years, to me the phrase ‘house’ has just one which means: Iran,” she wrote in a 2009 essay for The Instances.
“Irrespective of how a lot I’m in love with Paris and its indescribable magnificence,” she added, “Tehran with all its ugliness will in my eyes ceaselessly be the ‘bride’ of all cities all over the world.”
Her husband, Mattias Ripa, who helped translate “Persepolis” into English, died in 2025. An inventory of Ms. Satrapi’s survivors was not instantly accessible.
