The Iranian graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi, known for her autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, has died, aged 56. “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of [the Swedish screenwriter] Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” members of her family said in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse.
Writing in The Guardian, Angelique Chrisafis said that her “comic book masterpiece” Persepolis, originally published in France in four volumes between 2000 and 2003, transformed Western readers’ image of Iran. The graphic novel, in black-and-white comic strip images, depicts life in Tehran through the eyes of a girl named Marji following the establishment of the Islamic republic in 1979.
The narrative focuses on her experiences between the ages of six and 14, describing encounters with Iran’s brutal “morality police”, the fallout of the Iran-Iraq war and the loneliness of later being exiled to Europe.
“With Persepolis, I didn’t even think I’d find a publisher,” Satrapi told El País in 2020. “I thought I’d make 50 photocopies for my friends to read.” Satrapi was also nominated for an animated feature Oscar for the film adaptation, which won the Jury prize at the Cannes film festival in 2007.
Satrapi was born in Rasht in northern Iran in 1969 and grew up in Tehran. When she was 14, her parents, fearing she would be arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, sent her to the Lycée Français de Vienne in Austria.
But after a severe bout of bronchitis, she returned to Iran aged 19, gaining a Master’s degree in visual communication from the Islamic Azad University in Tehran. She also married but then divorced, decamping again to Europe in 1994 to study at the Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg. She later moved to Paris, becoming a French citizen in 2006.
In 2024, Satrapi oversaw Woman, Life, Freedom, a graphic anthology by 17 Iranian and international artists working in partnership with Iranian academics and researchers. The anthology reflects on the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in September 2022 in an Iranian hospital after being detained by the regime’s morality police for allegedly not complying with the country’s hijab regulations.
"It's not that I'm fearless or careless but there are kids in my country who are being shot and they are 17 years old, while I have lived for more than half a century,” she told Deadline in the wake of protests following Amini's death in police custody.
In a statement, President Emmanuel Macron said Satrapi was “a great artist who turned her Iranian childhood into a universal tale,” adding: “With her childlike perspective, her irony, her tenderness, her inner demons, the author created a moving world with which readers identified.”
"You changed the world with comics… I have lost my twin sister," said illustrator Joann Sfar on Instagram. “Marjane was a true artist and advocate for Iranian women and freedom. She disrupted literature with her wildly successful autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis,” wrote CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour on X.