Akram Pedramnia

Pedramnia is best known for her work in challenging and criticizing Iranian censorship opposing freedom of speech and expression of writers and artists. In 2013 she translated Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita into Persian, almost sixty years after its only other Persian translation. The book was published in Afghanistan, another Persian language speaking nation and Iran’s neighbouring country, by a Kabul-based publisher named Zaryab Publication. Soon after Lolita found its way to the Iranian underground market.

In response, the Iranian Minister of Cultural and Islamic Guidance declared that Pedramnia’s translation is banned and has been disseminated illegally. The book was later published in a different format as samizdat inside Iran. Due to the same argument her recent work, the translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, another forbidden book, has been planned for publication in six volumes by Nogaam Press, a Persian-language publisher based in London, England which aims to publish Persian writing and translation beyond the censorship concerns faced inside the country. The first volume was released in April 2019.

A German language newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung says: “Her translations are distributed as pirated or over the Internet without her earning a cent – but that does not bother Akram Pedramnia. She is even pleased. Thanks to her, Iranian readers can read Lolita or Tender Is the Night”.

She has also translated into Persian texts by various authors such as Colm Tóibín, E. L. Doctorow, Naomi Klein, Joan London (Gilgamesh), Noam Chomsky (Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy), Richard B. Wright (Clara Callan), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night, 2009), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, 2014) and James Joyce (Ulysses). A translation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace had not been published as of January 2019, as, according to Pedramnia, the publishers had requested cuts which she did not agree to.

Born and raised to a working class family in Kashan, Pedramnia studied English literacy at the University of Tehran. She was admitted then to Iran University of Medical Sciences and graduated as a physician in 1997. In Canada, she obtained a Health informatics degree from McMaster University.

Akram Pedramnia (Persian: اکرم پدرام‌نیا) (February 17, 1969) is an Iranian-Canadian writer, translator, Joycean scholar, researcher, activist, and physician. She has written, researched, and translated many English novels and political articles. She resides in Canada since 1998 when she had emigrated from Iran.

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