Lila Azam Zanganeh

Lila Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris to Iranian parents. Raised in a family spread throughout the world, she grew up to be fluent in six languages. After a cycle of preparatory classes at the Lycée Henri IV, she was admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure where she studied literature and philosophy. She then taught literature, cinema, and Romance languages at Harvard University, before moving to New York. She received a Master in international affairs from Columbia University, and edited an anthology of essays on contemporary Iranian culture which was translated in several countries. Since 2002, she has published literary and cultural articles in Le Monde, The New York Times, The Paris Review and La Repubblica. Her first book, entitled The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, is a combination of fiction and essay and will be published in 2011 in the United States (Norton), the United Kingdom (Penguin), France (L’Olivier), Holland (Contact), and Italy (L’Ancora del Mediterraneo). Her book has received praise from Salman Rushdie (winner of the Man Booker Prize), Orhan Pamuk (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature), Azar Nafisi (bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Teheran) and Dmitri Nabokov (son and literary executor of Nabokov). In the United States, alongside Kofi Annan, Madeleine Albright, and Colin Powell, Lila Azam Zanganeh serves on the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee, an organization which helps rebuild the lives of refugees around the world.