Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French author whose graphic novel series “Persepolis” introduced millions of readers to the struggles of ordinary Iranians during the turbulent years around the Islamic Revolution, has died at 56.
The office of President Emmanuel Macron of France announced her death in a statement on Thursday, but did not specify where, when or how she died.
“Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the statement said.
With the publication of “Persepolis” in the early 2000s, Ms. Satrapi became one of the best-known exponents of a form of graphic novel — influenced by Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” — that combined political history and memoir.
Its protagonist, Marji, was depicted living through some of the most difficult years of Iranian history, closely mirroring Ms. Satrapi’s own life.
Both author and character were born in Iran in 1969. Both were about 10 when the shah was overthrown. Both lived through the rise of the clerics and the horror of the Iran-Iraq War, and both left the country at 14 to try to study in Austria.
Ms. Satrapi moved in 1994 to Paris, where she wrote the “Persepolis” series, named after the Ancient Greek word for Persia. The books were published in France between 2000 and 2003; the first volume of an English translation was published in 2003, and the second volume was released a year later.
Millions of readers bought the books, which became a popular school assignment and one of the widest-read works to explore the interior lives of modern Iranians. The series was adapted into a 2007 film that was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated feature.
“Persepolis,” the author Fernanda Eberstadt wrote in a New York Times review, “dances with drama and insouciant wit,” its inky black-and-white drawings modeled on both contemporary comics and Persian miniatures.
Not quite two decades later, Ms. Satrapi set to work documenting another tumultuous moment in Iranian history: the unrest in 2022 that followed the death, in police custody, of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been detained and accused of violating a law requiring women to wear the hijab in public.
In protest, women across Iran tore off their veils, in one of the most significant cultural and political moments in the country since the 1979 revolution.
Ms. Satrapi’s work on the subject culminated in 2024 with the release of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” another graphic work of nonfiction. She contributed some drawings, but told The Times that she was more of a “director” of the project, which also featured work from other artists, activists, academics and journalists.
“Even basic human rights, they deny us,” she said of the Iranian government after the book was released. “You don’t have the right to dance, you don’t have the right to sing, you don’t have the right to do this, you don’t have the right to do that.”
Marjane Satrapi was born on Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, near the Caspian Sea, and grew up in Tehran. She had aristocratic ancestors and her parents were cosmopolitan leftists; her father was an engineer and her mother a clothing designer.
Sent by her parents to study in the safety of Austria, she was overwhelmed by experiencing a very different world. “At her nadir,” Simon Hattenstone wrote in The Guardian in 2008, “she was peddling drugs, homeless, and she almost died from bronchitis. After four years in Vienna, she admitted defeat, put on her veil and returned home.”
In Iran, she studied graphic arts and had an early marriage that ended in divorce. Returning to Europe, she got a second art degree in Strasbourg, France, before moving to Paris.
“I like living there because I can smoke everywhere, but it is going to change,” she said in 2007, around the time that smoking was banned in many public spaces in France. (Two years before, she had published an illustrated ode to smoking in The Times.)
Maybe, she mused, she would move to Greece, which had yet to introduce such stringent smoking restrictions.
Her husband, Mattias Ripa, who helped translate “Persepolis” into English, died last year. A list of her survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Satrapi wrote several children’s books and other graphic novels, including “Chicken with Plums,” the story of the death of her great-uncle, which was also turned into a film. Another of her works, “Embroideries,” depicted Iranian women discussing love, sex and men over afternoon tea.
She directed several feature films, including “The Voices” (2014), with Ryan Reynolds, and “Radioactive,” starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.
She also won acclaim as a painter and was elected in 2024 to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, one of the highest honors in the French art world.
Though she created some of the best-known works in the genre, Ms. Satrapi told The Times in 2007 that she never liked the term graphic novel.
“I think they made up this term for the bourgeoisie not to be scared of comics,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, this is the kind of comics you can read.’”
She wrote frequently about her perpetual sense of dislocation — living away from Iran, but thinking constantly of her home country.
“I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word ‘home’ has only one meaning: Iran,” Ms. Satrapi wrote in a 2009 essay for The Times.
“No matter how much I am in love with Paris and its indescribable beauty,” she added, “Tehran with all its ugliness will in my eyes forever be the ‘bride’ of all cities around the world.”
Amelia Nierenberg is a Times reporter covering international news from London.
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