Prisoner of Tehran

The autobiography Prisoner of Tehran tells the story of author Marina Nemat’s teenage imprisonment in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. Published in 2006, many years after Marina’s traumatic experiences, and after she finally gathered the courage to speak out about what she had gone through, the book traces her childhood before and after the Islamic Revolution that toppled Iran’s monarchy and replaced it with Ayatollah Khomeini’s totalitarian theocracy.

Marina grew up in a Russian Orthodox family in Tehran, Iran – a descendant of the wave of Russians who fled to Iran during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Her mother was a hairdresser and her father taught dance. As she remembers her childhood, it was a happy and normal one: church, school, summers in a small country cottage, and the beginnings of a relationship with a church friend Andre Nemat.

When Marina was in high school, the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Islamic Revolutionaries, and overnight the country became a repressive and punitive state run on fundamentalist Islamic principles. The sixteen-year-old Marina protested the changes the government was putting in place – particularly as they affected her school and education. She published several articles in the school newspaper arguing against replacing the standard curriculum with pro-government propaganda. Then, after asking her calculus teacher to continue teaching the class math instead of switching to an all-Islamic lecture, Marina led thirty other girls on a walkout.



Soon afterwards, on January 15, 1982, the teenage Marina was arrested and immediately imprisoned in Tehran’s most feared place: Evin Prison, the site of torture and abuse. In prison, Marina is placed on death row. As she is beaten and tortured repeatedly, she watches many of her friends die either because of the way they are treated or through execution. During this time, Marina writes, the only thing that allowed her to survive was clinging to her "Christian forbearance" – her strong religious belief was a way to keep sane.

On the day she is to be executed, she is led out in front of a firing squad, blindfolded, and just as she is about to be shot to death, a last-second clemency spares her life. One of her interrogators, Ali, has fallen in love with her. Ali uses his family connections to get her death sentence commuted by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself. Now, instead of being condemned to execution, Marina is instead given a sentence of life imprisonment – all for the crime of asking her teacher to teach calculus.

After many more months in the prison, it becomes clear that Ali didn’t just save her for her sake. Instead, he wants her to convert to Islam and marry him – or else, he threatens, he will arrest her whole family and Andre and have them executed.



Terrified and out of options, Marina agrees to marry the guard, and is released from prison after the marriage and conversion are finalized. She is now forced to live as Ali’s “trophy wife” – trapped in a horrible marriage where her husband rapes her nightly. Eventually, however, Ali gets him comeuppance, as his revolutionary friends and coworkers – also known as the government’s hired thugs – assassinate him on the government’s orders. Proving that in his own disturbed way he did really care about her, Ali’s last wish before dying is for his father to take Marina back to her parents’ house. There, she manages to reconnect with Andre and, eventually, they get married.

In 1991, the Nemats escape to Canada, where they have two children. Several decades later, when a Canadian journalist is captured in Iran, brutally tortured, raped, and finally killed, Marina decides to break her silence, telling her story to give a voice to other political prisoners whose fate wasn’t as lucky as hers. The book ends as Marina teaches others how to write their stories to share more people’s voices with the world.