I had little idea what to expect from a lunch with Azar Nafisi. I only knew her from her writing. To her surprise, the Iranian emigre has become a literary celebrity in the west owing to the success of Reading Lolita in Tehran - an account of the clandestine book club she established in theocratic Iran.
What shines through in Nafisi's 2003 memoir is the stubborn defiance required to keep up the simple routine of meeting once a week to discuss books in today's Iran. Equally powerful is the degree of imagination, purpose and self-worth that Nafisi's students gained from exploring fiction about such different times and places. At its heart, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a passionate defence of the universal relevance of literature. That was why I wanted to have lunch with her.
