Roya Hakakian

Roya Hakakian is a writer. Her opinion columns, essays and book reviews appear in English language publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR’s All Things Considered among many others. She has collaborated on over a dozen hours of programming for leading journalism units in network television, including CBS 60 Minutes. She currently serves as an editorial board member of World Affairs. An active thinker of foreign relations, Roya is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. She has been featured in the Washington Post and the US News and World Report, among other publications. In the book, Political Awakenings by University of California at Berkeley’s Professor Harry Kreisler, she has been highlighted “among the most important activists, academics, and journalists of her generation.”

In 2008, she received a Guggenheim prize in nonfiction. It enabled her to complete the work on her most recent book, Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic), about Iran’s terror campaign against exiled dissidents in Western Europe received the Asian American Literary Award for best non-fiction book in 2013. It was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011, made Newsweek’s Top Ten Not-to-be-missed books and was among Kirkus Reviews Best Non-Fictions in the same year. Her account of the work of the German prosecutor of the case, a modern day Atticus Finch, moved the US Federal Bar Association to establish “the Rule of Law Award,” the first of which was bestowed upon that prosecutor in 2014 at the Daniel Moynihan Federal Courthouse in New York City.

Her memoir of growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown) has been a celebrated Freshman Experience book at a number of colleges in the US. It was a Barnes and Noble’s Pick of the Week, Ms. Magazine Must Read of the Summer, Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year, Elle Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2004, and was named Best Memoir by the Connecticut Center for the Book in 2005 and has been translated into several languages including German, Dutch, and Spanish.

She is currently at work on a new book at the The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she has been awarded a fellowship in 2014. Talking to her readers is one of her great joys and she has addressed them at venues ranging from high schools on Native American reservations to the US Capitol and the CIA.