Shokoofeh Azar

Shokoofeh Azar (born 1972) is an Iranian writer and painter who moved to Australia as a political refugee in 2011. Graduated in literature, she worked extensively as a journalist before becoming an author. Azar has published essays, articles, reportage, collections of short stories, and a children’s book. Notably, she is the first Iranian woman to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road. Her novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, originally written in Farsi (Persian) and published in Australia in 2017, is her first novel to be translated into English. The novel was shortlisted for Australia’s Stella Prize for Fiction (2018) and for the 2020 International Booker Prize.