Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi (Persian: مرجان ساتراپی ‎; born 22 November 1969) is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author. Her most famous works are the comic book Persepolis and its film adaptation, and Chicken with Plums.

Satrapi was born in Rasht, Iran. She grew up in Tehran in a middle-class Iranian family. Both her parents were politically active and supported Marxist causes against the monarchy of the last Shah. When the Iranian Revolution took place in 1979, they were oppressed by the Muslim fundamentalists who took power.

They arranged for her to live with a family friend to study abroad, and in 1983 she arrived in Vienna, Austria, to attend the Lycée Français de Vienne. She stayed in Vienna through her high school years, often moving from one residence to another as situations changed, and sometimes stayed at friends' homes. Eventually, she was homeless and lived on the streets for three months, until she was hospitalized for an almost deadly bout of pneumonia. Upon recovery, she returned to Iran. She studied visual communication, eventually obtaining a master's degree from Islamic Azad University in Tehran.

Satrapi became famous worldwide because of her critically acclaimed autobiographical graphic novels, originally published in French in four parts in 2000–2003 and in English translation in two parts in 2003 and 2004, respectively, as Persepolis and Persepolis 2, which describe her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe. Persepolis won the Angoulême Coup de Coeur Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. In 2013, Chicago schools were ordered by the district to remove Persepolis from classrooms because of the work's graphic language and violence. This incited protests and controversy. Her later publication, Embroideries (Broderies), was also nominated for the Angoulême Album of the Year award in 2003, an award that her novel Chicken with Plums (Poulet aux prunes) won. She has also contributed to the Op-Ed section of The New York Times.

Persepolis was adapted into an animated film of the same name. It debuted at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in May 2007 and shared a Special Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light (Luz silenciosa). Co-written and co-directed by Satrapi and director Vincent Paronnaud, the French-language picture stars the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, and Simon Abkarian. The English version, starring the voices of Gena Rowlands, Sean Penn, and Iggy Pop, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in January 2008. Satrapi was the first woman to be nominated for the award. However, the Iranian government denounced the film and got it dropped from the Bangkok International Film Festival. Otherwise, Persepolis was a very successful film both commercially (with over a million admissions in France alone) as well as critically, winning Best First Film at the César Awards 2008. The film reflects many tendencies of first-time filmmaking in France (which makes up around 40% of all French cinema each year), notably in its focus on very intimate rites of passage, and quite ambivalently recounted coming-of-age moments.

Following the Iranian elections in June 2009, Satrapi and Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf appeared before Green Party members in the European Parliament to present a document allegedly received from a member of the Iranian electoral commission claiming that the reform candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, had actually won the election, and that the conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had received only 12% of the vote.

Satrapi prefers the term "comic books" to "graphic novels." "People are so afraid to say the word 'comic'," she told the Guardian newspaper in 2011. "It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and that disappears. No: it's all comics."

Satrapi and Paronnaud continued their successful collaboration with a second film, a live-action adaptation of Chicken with Plums, released in late 2011. In 2012, Satrapi directed and acted in the comedy crime film Gang of the Jotas, from her own screenplay.

Satrapi married Reza, a veteran of the Iran–Iraq War, when she was 21, whom she later divorced. She then moved to Strasbourg, France. Her parents told her that Iran was no longer the place for her, and encouraged her to stay in Europe permanently.

In 2014 Satrapi directed the comedy-horror film The Voices, from a screenplay by Michael R. Perry.

In 2019, Satrapi directed a biopic of two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Sklodowska Curie, the Polish scientist. Curie was merely her surname by marriage to Pierre, by convention of that era. She patriotically named her second discovered element as Polonium in honour of her country of birth. The film title is Radioactive.