Lila Azam Zanganeh

Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud[4] she moved to the United States to become a teaching fellow in literature, cinema, and Romance languages at Harvard University. In 2002, she began contributing literary articles, interviews, and essays to a host of American and European publications, among which The New York Times, The Paris Review, Le Monde, and la Repubblica.[5][6] on April 2014, she was briefly married to a Brazilian financier.

Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, has been published by W. W. Norton & Company in the United States, Penguin Books in the United Kingdom, fr:Éditions de L'Olivier in France, Contact in Holland, L'Ancora del Mediterraneo in Italy, Duomo Ediciones in Spain, Azbooka in Russia, Büchergilde Gutenberg in Germany, Everest in Turkey, Shang Shu in China, Al-Kamel in Lebanon, and Alfaguara Objetiva in Brazil, where it reached No. 10 on the national Brazilian bestseller list.

She is fluent in seven languages (English, French, Persian, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese) and is the recipient of the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, awarded each year by the Center for Fiction. She writes and lives in New York City, and is at work on a new novel titled A Tale for Lovers & Madmen.

In a 2018 piece for Vogue, she discussed her background and life growing up in a different culture, writing:

Home is a place for which I do not grieve. Because I hold it in my hand, and conjure its centuries at will. Landscapes that rise and fall, live worlds inside shadows in my eyes. Spaces full of spheres, sunshot, almost silent. The plateaus of Kurdistan, where my father rode saddleless horses, and ate wild berries as a very young man. Perhaps my parents’ loss of country is merely theirs, it’s no longer mine. Through their lilt of Persian, I have learnt my own, French-inflected, ever foreign. Through their loss, I have found my place, the only place I know, the only home I want. A place that’s always here, and nowhere at all, a home without perimeter.[7]

Azam Zanganeh serves on the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee [8] and the Advisory Board of Libraries Without Borders. Since September 2015, she has served as the Chair of Programs for Narrative 4,[9] a global story-exchange organization that promotes radical empathy.

Up until the end of 2011, Azam Zanganeh served on the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organization which provides a daily meal to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa.

• The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness (2011). ISBN 978-0-393-07992-0
• My Sister, Guard Your Veil, My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices (2006) (edited by Lila Azam Zanganeh). ISBN 978-0-8070-0463-0

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lila Azam Zanganeh.

• "Ecstasy on 3 x 5 Cards: Lila Azam Zanganeh's Nabokov", interview on Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon, June 1, 2011.
• Lila Azam Zanganeh on the portal RAI Letteratura
• Lila Azam Zanganeh at the Berlin International Literature Festival 2013