About the Author: Lila Azam Zanganeh

Lila Azam Zanganeh is a writer raised in Paris, France, by exiled Iranian parents. She lives and works in New York City. She is the author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness.

Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to teach literature, cinema, and Romance languages at Harvard University. In 2002, she began contributing literary articles, interviews, and essays to a host of American and European publications, among which The New York Times, The Paris Review, Le Monde, and la Repubblica.

Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, has been published by W. W. Norton & Company in the United States, Penguin Books in the United Kingdom, L'Olivier in France, Contact in Holland, L'Ancora del Mediterraneo in Italy, Duomo Ediciones in Spain, Azbooka in Russia, Büchergilde Gutenberg in Germany, and Alfaguara Objetiva in Brazil, where it reached #10 on the national Brazilian bestseller list. In 2016, it will be published by Shang Shu in China, Everest in Turkey, and Al-Kamel in Lebanon.

She is fluent in seven languages (English, French, Persian, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese) and is the recipient of the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, awarded each year by the Center for Fiction. She writes and lives in New York City, and is at work on a new novel titled A Tale for Lovers&Madmen.

Azam Zanganeh serves on the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee and the Advisory Board of Libraries Without Borders. Since September 2015, she has served as the Chair of Programs for Narrative4, a global story-exchange organization that promotes radical empathy.

Up until the end of 2011, Azam Zanganeh served on the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organization which provides a daily meal to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa.