Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French writer whose graphic novel collection “Persepolis” launched tens of millions of readers to the struggles of abnormal Iranians through the turbulent years across the Islamic Revolution, has died at 56.
The workplace of President Emmanuel Macron of France introduced her demise in an announcement on Thursday, however 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 assertion mentioned.
With the publication of “Persepolis” within the early 2000s, Ms. Satrapi turned one of many best-known exponents of a type of graphic novel — influenced by Artwork Spiegelman’s “Maus” — that mixed political historical past and memoir.
Its protagonist, Marji, was depicted dwelling via a few of the most troublesome years of Iranian historical past, intently mirroring Ms. Satrapi’s personal life.
Each writer and character have been born in Iran in 1969. Each have been about 10 when the shah was overthrown. Each lived via the rise of the clerics and the horror of the Iran-Iraq Battle, and each left the nation at 14 to attempt to research in Austria.
Ms. Satrapi moved in 1994 to Paris, the place she wrote the “Persepolis” collection, named after the Historical Greek phrase for Persia. The books have been revealed in France between 2000 and 2003; the primary quantity of an English translation was published in 2003, and the second volume was launched a 12 months later.
Hundreds of thousands of readers purchased the books, which turned a well-liked faculty project and one of many widest-read works to discover the inside lives of recent Iranians. The collection was tailored right into a 2007 movie that was nominated for the Academy Award for finest animated characteristic.
“Persepolis,” the writer Fernanda Eberstadt wrote in a New York Instances evaluation, “dances with drama and insouciant wit,” its inky black-and-white drawings modeled on each modern comics and Persian miniatures.
Not fairly twenty years later, Ms. Satrapi set to work documenting 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, Mahsa Aminiwho had been detained and accused of violating a regulation requiring ladies to put on the hijab in public.
In protest, ladies throughout Iran tore off their veils, in one of the vital cultural and political moments within the nation for the reason that 1979 revolution.
Ms. Satrapi’s work on the topic culminated in 2024 with the discharge of “Lady, Life, Freedom,” another graphic work of nonfiction. She contributed some drawings, however told The Times that she was extra of a “director” of the venture, which additionally featured work from different artists, activists, teachers and journalists.
“Even fundamental human rights, they deny us,” she said of the Iranian government after the ebook was launched. “You don’t have the precise to bounce, you don’t have the precise to sing, you don’t have the precise to do that, you don’t have the precise to do this.”
Marjane Satrapi was born on Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, close to the Caspian Sea, and grew up in Tehran. She had aristocratic ancestors and her dad and mom have been cosmopolitan leftists; her father was an engineer and her mom a clothes designer.
Despatched by her dad and mom to review within the security of Austria, she was overwhelmed by experiencing a really totally different world. “At her nadir,” Simon Hattenstone wrote in The Guardian in 2008, “she was peddling medicine, homeless, and he or she virtually died from bronchitis. After 4 years in Vienna, she admitted defeat, placed on her veil and returned residence.”
In Iran, she studied graphic arts and had an early marriage that resulted in divorce. Returning to Europe, she obtained a second artwork diploma in Strasbourg, France, earlier than transferring to Paris.
“I like dwelling there as a result of I can smoke in all places, however it will change,” she said in 2007, across the time that smoking was banned in lots of public areas in France. (Two years earlier than, she had revealed an illustrated ode to smoking in The Instances.)
Perhaps, she mused, she would transfer to Greece, which had but to introduce such stringent smoking restrictions.
Her husband, Mattias Ripa, who helped translate “Persepolis” into English, died final 12 months. A listing of her survivors was not instantly accessible.
Ms. Satrapi wrote a number of kids’s books and different graphic novels, together with “Hen with Plums,” the story of the demise of her great-uncle, which was additionally become a movie. One other of her works, “Embroideries,” depicted Iranian ladies discussing love, intercourse and males over afternoon tea.
She directed a number of characteristic movies, together with “The Voices” (2014), with Ryan Reynolds, and “Radioactive,” starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.
She additionally received 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.
Although she created a few of the best-known works within the style, Ms. Satrapi told The Times in 2007 that she by no means appreciated the time period graphic novel.
“I believe they made up this time period for the bourgeoisie to not be terrified of comics,” she mentioned. “Like, ‘Oh, that is the type of comics you may learn.’”
She wrote incessantly about her perpetual sense of dislocation — dwelling away from Iran, however pondering always of her residence nation.
“I name Iran residence as a result of regardless of how lengthy I reside in France, and even though I really feel additionally French in spite of everything these years, to me the phrase ‘residence’ has just one which means: Iran,” Ms. Satrapi 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 around the globe.”
