Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French writer of graphic novel ‘Persepolis’, dies aged 56
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French artist, filmmaker and writer of the autobiographical graphic novel “Persepolis”, has died aged 56, French President Emmanuel Macron’s workplace mentioned on Thursday.
“Her passing is that of a determine of French tradition and of an artist enamored of freedom, whose work carried a common message and had earned her immense worldwide renown,” the Elysee mentioned in an announcement.
A press release launched by members of her household to the French information company AFP mentioned she had died of “unhappiness” slightly over a yr after the dying of her husband, Swedish actor, producer and screenwriter Mattias Ripa. No additional details about the reason for her dying was obtainable.
Born in 1969, Satrapi spent her childhood in Tehran in a communist-leaning family. Her mother and father despatched her to Vienna as an adolescent, earlier than she returned to Iran to check high-quality arts and later settled in France, the place she continued her coaching in Strasbourg.
She drew on that lifetime of revolution, exile and return in “Persepolis”, the stark black-and-white memoir that chronicled her childhood throughout and after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The e book turned a global success and was later tailored into an animated movie, which received the jury prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Satrapi’s work combined political defiance with darkish humour and a stripped-down visible model, making her one of many best-known graphic novelists of her technology. She went on to direct movies together with “Rooster with Plums”, “The Voices” and “Radioactive”, about scientist Marie Sklodowska Curie.
Satrapi additionally designed a nine-metre wool triptych for the Paris 2024 Olympics, displaying athletes competing across the Eiffel Tower.
Satrapi additionally turned a outstanding voice on exile, girls’s freedom and authoritarianism, regularly utilizing her public platform to denounce repression in Iran.
In 2025, she refused the Legion of Honour, France’s prime order of advantage, citing France’s “hypocritical angle” towards Iran, French media reported.
“I can’t proceed seeing the kids of Iranian oligarchs come to spend their holidays in France, even develop into naturalized, whereas on the identical time younger dissidents have problem in acquiring a vacationer visa to return to see what the nation of the Enlightenment and human rights appears to be like like,” she wrote on the time.
