Writer and Editor
Guppy promoted Persian culture and history, and was a commentator on relations between the West and the Islamic world. Guppy's first book, The Blindfold Horse: Memoirs of a Persian Childhood, was published in 1988. It was highly praised, winning the Yorkshire Post Prize from the Royal Society of Literature, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Grand Prix Littéraire de Elle. The book describes a Persia before the excesses of Shah Reza Pahlavi led to his overthrow, describing a country with an Islamic way of life without dogmatism or fanaticism.
Her last book, The Secret of Laughter (2005), is a collection of Persian fairy tales from Iran’s oral tradition. Many had never previously been published in written form.
For twenty years, until 2005, she was the London editor of the American literary journal The Paris Review.
Read more about this topic: Shusha Guppy
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“[The pleasures of writing] correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading, the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader: by the satisfied writer and the grateful reader, or—which is the same thing—by the artist grateful to the unknown force in his mind that has suggested a combination of images and by the artistic reader whom his combination satisfies.”
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