Mahshid Amirshahi (Persian: مهشید امیرشاهی; surname also Romanized as Amir-Shahy or Amirshahy; born 9 April 1937) is an Iranian novelist, short story writer, humorist, literary critic, journalist, and translator.
Amirshahi was born on 9 April 1937 in Kermanshah to Amir Amirshahi, a magistrate, and Moloud Khanlary, a political activist.
Amirshahi attended primary and part of the secondary school in Tehran Iran and later went to Charters Towers, a private boarding school in Bexhill-on-Sea Sussex, England. After obtaining her O- and A-levels in various subject matters she studied physics at Woolwich Polytechnic in London.
Dead End Alley (1345), Sar Bibi Khanum (1347), After the Last Day (1348), and in the first person singular (1350) were short stories written before the revolution. ; Hazr (1987), Safar (1995), and four volumes of the novel Mothers and Daughters were all published outside of the United States (1998-2009).
At the initial stages of the Islamic revolution in Iran she publicly took position against fundamentalism and in favour of a secular democracy. She was an open supporter of Shapour Bakhtiar (the last Premier of Iran prior to the Islamic Republic) and Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh. This forced her into exile, where she kept working in her writing and political activism. Some critics have called her novels: Dar hazar & Dar safar (At Home & Away) as well as her quartet: Maadaraan o Dokhtaraan (Mothers and Daughters), all written in exile, “modern classics of Persian literature”.
Amirshahi has given many lectures at the Palais du Luxembourg (the French Senate) and Harvard University, and has written dozens of articles mostly in Persian with occasional contributions to publications such as Newsday (USA) and Les Temps Modernes (France) in English and French. One of her notable political stands while in exile has been her instigation of the declaration of the Iranian intellectuals and artists in defence of the British author Salman Rushdie, who had become the object of a notorious manhunt owing to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against him and his book The Satanic Verses. Mahshid Amirshahi was one of the founders of the “Comité de défense de Salman Rushdie en France” and a member of a similar Committee for Taslima Nasreen, the writer who was the target of attacks by fundamentalists in Bangladesh.
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