Bio:
Roya Hakakian is an Iranian American journalist, lecturer, and writer. She is the author of several acclaimed books in English, and two collections of poetry in Persian. Her essays and other writings have been included in many anthologies, including the PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. Deeply influenced by both the longstanding literary traditions of her birth country and its historical turmoils, she takes on the most pressing and difficult contemporary sociopolitical issues —exile, persecution, censorship— and injects them with relevance and urgency through her deeply observant and poetic sensibility to make these subjects accessible to all readers.
In addition to writing books, she also contributes essays and opinion pieces to journals such as the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic, among others. She’s been featured on major TV networks, including Fareed Zakaria GPS. She has worked in television news, at CBS 60 Minutes and the ABC documentary unit. She’s been a fellow at some of the leading think tanks in Washington, and serves on the editorial board of the American Purpose. Born and raised in a family of Jewish educators in Iran, Hakakian came to the US on political asylum.
Project:
Hakakian will work on a historical nonfiction book manuscript that tells the story of Hajj Sayyah, the Traveler, the first Iranian to become a naturalized US citizen. A self-fashioned Marco Polo, Sayyah left Iran penniless in 1859 to discover a world beyond his own country. Seven years later, arriving in the US, he was deeply transformed after encountering notions such as individual liberty and human rights. He later coined the original terms for the two concepts in Persian. In the US, he believed he’d found the utopia he’d been searching for. But in the end, he was betrayed by America (when he was dismissed for being a Muslim at the US embassy in Tehran), and was shunned in Iran for his "foreign" ideas.
150 years later, Sayyah’s tale remains as emblematic as it was then. Iranians are still fighting for human rights and democracy, taking the dangerous steps toward creating a secular form of governance. The US and Iran still remain at odds with each other, as a new generation, many of whom like Hajj Sayyah, dream of living under the rule of law in a free and democratic society.
