2006: Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi is the author of the national best-seller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which paints a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. The book spent more than 70 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and has been translated in 32 languages.

Nafisi is a visiting professor and the director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics.