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Shahla Lahiji, chief director of Roshangaran Publishing in Tehran, Iran is one of the most highly honored publishers in her field. The first woman publisher in Iran, she is the publisher of Shirin Ebadi (Nobel Peace Prize 2003) and an outspoken human rights advocate.
Lahiji has been coming to Frankfurt on and off for decades. She came to the world’s attention in 2000, after she was arrested for after returning to Iran from Berlin, where she participated in an academic conference sponsored by the Heinrich Boll Institute that was critical of the then government. After spending two months in jail, she was released on parole.
Lahiji’ has won both the 2001 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award and the first IPA Freedom Prize. I asked caught up with here on the show floor to get an update on what the publishing environment is like for her today.
“Things have gotten 1000 times worse under the current regime in the last year,” said Lahiji. ‘We had 40 of my books banned between 2007 and 2008, meaning I was only able to publish about 15 titles. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it.”
Nevertheless, she remains undaunted in her mission to create a “dialogue through books.”
One project Lahiji has in the works was to publish an edition of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil
Government – one of the documents in which the philosopher outlined the framework for a liberal, democratic society. Lahiji intends to bind a copy of the United States Constitution into the back of the book as an example of Locke’s treatise at work.
“I won’t be doing it in this edition,” she said, “but maybe the next.”
Asked if she ever has any trouble traveling to the Frankfurt Book Fair for her work, Lahiji cracks a joke: “No. Sometimes I think they are hoping I don’t go back.”
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