Azar Nafisi

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature: Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita. 'We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of oridinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fictiion'.