Mini biography

Marjane Satrapi ( November 22, 1969, Rasht, Iran)

She grew up in Tehran in a progressive family.

She attended the Lycée Français there and witnessed, as a child, the growing oppression of civil liberties and the everyday-life consequences of Iranian politics, including the fall of the Shah, the early regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and the first years of the Iran-Iraq war.

Satrapi's mother is a great-granddaughter of Nasser-al-Din Shah, Shah of Persia from 1848 until 1896.

However, Satrapi points out that "the kings of the Qajar dynasty...had hundreds of wives. They made thousands of kids.

If you multiply these kids by generation you have, I don't know, ten to fifteen thousand princes and princesses. There's nothing extremely special about that."

“The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.”

In 1983, at the age of 14, Satrapi was sent to Vienna, Austria, by her parents in order to flee the Iranian regime.

According to her autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, she lived there during her high school years, returning to Iran for college.

At college, she met a man named Reza, married then divorced him, and moved to Strasbourg, France. She currently lives in Paris, where she works as an illustrator and an author of children's books.

Marjane Satrapi self portraitSatrapi's career began in earnest when she met David B., a French comics artist. She adopted a style similar to his, especially in her earliest works.

Satrapi became famous worldwide because of her critically acclaimed, autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2, which describe her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe in an intelligent and engaging portrait of everyday life.

Persepolis won the Angoulême Coup de Coeur Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

Her later publication, Broderies (Embroideries) was also nominated for the Angoulême Album of the Year award in 2003, an award which was won by her most recent novel, Poulet aux prunes.

She currently writes an illustrated column in the Op-Ed section of The New York Times, apparently on an irregular schedule.

It was announced in 2006 that Sony Pictures Classics would be turning Persepolis into an animated film, to be released in 2007.

Co-written and co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, the French-language picture is to star the voice of Chiara Mastroianni and will also feature Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, and Simon Abkarian. It will also be released in English.

Director - Selected filmography

1. Chicken with Plums - Poulet aux prunes (2011)
   
2. Persepolis (2007)