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We Lived To Tell
We Lived To Tell
Political Prison Memoirs of Iranian Women
Azadeh Agah, Sousan Mehr & Shadi Parsi

Honouring the promise of its title, We Lived To Tell shines the harsh light of truth on the lives of three women who survived imprisonment by Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic regime in the 1980s and of many who did not. In distinct first person narratives, Azadeh Agah, Sousan Mehr and Shadi Parsi document how the Islamic Republic tried to break the spirits and minds of its best and brightest women, and how they found ways to resist.

Sousan Mehr’s Years of Fire and Ash is a fast-paced story that begins on the night of her arrest and does not let up, carrying readers inside infamous Evin prison, and inside her passionate commitment to positive political change and her careful compassion for those around her.

In As Long as There are Poppies, human rights advocate Azadeh Agah details the daily lives of women and children, including her own, with whom she lived in prison. With a journalist’s eye and an activist’s sense of injustice, she links events in the prison to larger political events in the country.

Shadi Parsi’s lyrical The Five Seasons tells of friends lost and found, a loving family anxious about their imprisoned daughter and the bewildering estrangement of daily life on release. Her moving evocations of time and lives lost render beauty from murderous injustice.

With colour images of items made secretly in prison, prison letters and journals and official papers, We Lived To Tell is the first English-language collection of memoirs written by women who were political prisoners in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“We Lived to Tell is a powerful testimony of survival, defiance and resistance of the soul, belief in freedom, and the human right to pursue an end to injustice.”

Haifa Zangana

“Azadeh, Sousan, and Shadi speak of pain, sorrow, and anger; they also remind us of love, happiness, generosity and forgiveness. They write these memoirs to put us in touch with the most humane aspects of being human.”

Shahrzad Mojab

Authors' information: Azadeh Agah | Sousan Mehr | Shadi Parsi