Shahrnush Parsipur, the acclaimed Iranian novelist best known for Women Without Men, has died at the age of 80. A pioneer of women's literature in Iran, she used subversive feminist fiction to challenge the country's patriarchal culture, and was imprisoned four times under both the Shah and the Islamic Republic. Her death marks the loss of a major dissident literary voice, whose UK publisher Denise Rose Hansen said her "legacy in literary history can't really be compared to anyone else's".

Born in Tehran in 1946, Parsipur studied sociology at the University of Tehran and published her debut novel in 1974, becoming Iran's second female novelist after Simin Daneshvar. She was first jailed after resigning from state television over the execution of two poets, and later spent four years and seven months imprisoned without charge in the 1980s. Her 1989 novel Women Without Men, set during the 1953 coup, became an underground success and led to a further imprisonment over its depiction of women's sexuality, prompting her to live in political exile in the US from 1994. In 2026 the novel was published in the UK for the first time and longlisted for the International Booker prize, with further English translations of her work due through 2028.