Shahrnush Parsipur
Remembering one of the defining voices of modern Persian literature through three restored photographs.
Today, after hearing of Shahrnush Parsipur’s death, I returned to three photographs that friends had sent me over the years. They were small, low-resolution images. Restoring them felt like a small act of remembrance.
Shahrnush was a friend of my late sister, Nahid, which makes these photographs especially meaningful to me. I also came to know Shahrnush’s voice through her book reviews on Radio Zamaneh, which I rarely missed.
In novels such as Women Without Men and Touba and the Meaning of Night, she blended myth, memory and everyday life in ways that reshaped modern Persian fiction. Years of imprisonment, censorship and exile never diminished her imagination.
The photograph that moved me most shows Parsipur as a baby with her mother, Samilah (Fakhr al-Muluk). When I learnt that Samilah’s mother was Shams al-Muluk Ghaffari, known as Touba, I immediately thought of Touba and the Meaning of Night.
More than fourteen years ago, I restored this same childhood photograph for Yesterday’s Kids, a ShahreFarang feature celebrating childhood photographs of notable Iranians. With today’s restoration tools, I was able to recover details that were impossible to reveal then.
Old photographs are more than records of faces. They preserve lives, relationships and the threads that connect memory to history. Restoring them has become my small way of preserving cultural memory, one image at a time.
© Mehrdad Aref-Adib 2026
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