Roya Hakakian

Roya Hakakian (born 1966) is an Iranian American Jewish journalist, lecturer, and writer.

Born in Iran, she came to the United States as a refugee and is now a naturalized citizen.

She is the author of several books, including an acclaimed memoir in English called Journey from the Land of No (Crown), Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic), and A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf).

Deeply influenced by both the longstanding literary traditions of her birth country and its historical turmoils, Roya Hakakian often draws her inspirations from highly political subjects and treats them with lyricism.

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.

Hakakian was born and raised in a Jewish family in Tehran.

Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown) begins in 1974 and ends in 1984, the ten years during which Iran transformed.

She was barely a teenager during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Hakakian carefully chooses a handful of personal stories which illuminate the greater stories she wishes to tell, namely how the lives of women, Jewish community, and secular Iranians changed in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution.

The book was a Barnes & Noble's Pick of the Week, Ms. magazine Must Read of the Summer and Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year.

After the return of Ayatollah Khomeini and the rise in anti-semitism as well as social and economic pressures and ongoing war with Iraq, she emigrated in May 1985, to the United States on political asylum.

She studied psychology at Brooklyn College and also studied poetry under the American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg during her time there.

Hakakian was a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2000 to 2004.

Hakakian came to critical attention as an author for her 2004 memoir, Journey from the Land of No.

Her memoir's publication was hailed by Yale University Professor Harold Bloom as the debut of a writer with "a major literary career."

Her essays on Iranian issues have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and on NPR.

It also received an Elle magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of 2004.

In granting the award, one Elle magazine jury member Danielle Bauter said, “Hakakian eloquently captures her childhood with words that create a dreamscape in the mind’s eye.

From the perspective of a teenager coming to terms with her own identity and the changing times around her, she juxtaposes the innocence of her youth with the fierceness of Iran’s political climate.

I became very involved with her journey, and the beauty of her writing drew me into her story — so much so that I will think about this book long after having finished it.”

The playwright Katori Hall in her review of the book for the Boston Globe said, “A spectacular debut memoir.

. . Only a major writing talent like Hakakian can use the pointed words of the mature mind to give the perspective of the child.

… She tackles ideologies of assimilation and oppression with poetic aplomb and precision.

... . Hakakian’s tale of passage into womanhood lacks nothing.”

The Baltimore Sun said of the book, “Hakakian, irrepressible, brave, and strong-willed, watches in dismay as the country she loves disappears, to be replaced by one that views what Roya most values—an insatiable intellect—with profound contempt.

It won the Persian Heritage Foundation's 2006 Latifeh Yarshater Book Award, and is the 2005 winner of the Best Memoir by the Connecticut Center for the Book.

Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, she began working on Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, a non-fiction account of the Mykonos restaurant assassinations of Iranian opposition leaders in Berlin.

From 2009 to 2010, she was a fellow at the Yale Whitney Humanities Center and is a current fellow at Yale University's Davenport College.

In 2009, Hakakian spoke at the University of California at Berkeley, detailing her life from Iran to the United States and discussing the parallels between Muslim and Jewish youths in reconciling “modernity and religious identity.”

Professor Harry Kreisler, the host of the UCBK's interview series, later published a selection of his best interviews in a book called Political Awakenings: Conversations with History, including Hakakian's interview.

He called Hakakian "one of the most important activists, academics, and journalists of our generation.”

The book was later published in 2011 by Grove/Atlantic.

In 2014–2015, she was a visiting fellow at the Wilson Center for International Scholars.

Since 2015, she has taught writing at the THREAD at Yale.

She was a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center and served on the board of Refugees International.

In 2018, Hakakian was also a scholar at Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University.

In 2021, she joined the board of the Connecticut Immigrant & Refugee Coalition as an honorary member.

She is also a permanent member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

As of 2023, she is a visiting fellow at the Agora Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

She has been a featured speaker at many colleges and universities as well as she has appeared on CBS This Morning, PBS' Now with Bill Moyers, The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC, among others.