About Lila Azam Zanganeh
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| Photo © 2010 Hank Gans |
Lila Azam Zanganeh was born, quite by accident, in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States in 1998 to teach literature, cinema and Romance languages at Harvard University.
She is, since 2002, a literary contributor to Le Monde and has been published in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Nation, The Paris Review, and La Repubblica. In 2006, she edited a collection of narrative essays on Iran. Her first book, Nabokov, or The Invention of Happiness, will be published in 2011 by Norton in the United States, Penguin in England, L'Olivier in France, and Contact in Holland.
Lila is fluent in six languages and serves on the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee.
"One cobalt-blue morning of butterfly hunting, in August 1971, after climbing a Swiss mountain, looking tanned and serene, net in hand, Vladimir Nabokov told his son Dmitri that he had fulfilled all he ever dreamed, and was a supremely happy man. It is on this mountainous peak that I like to imagine him, VN, exclaiming like his elated creature Van Veen: 'I, Vladimir Nabokov, salute you, life!'
Dmitri snapped a photo that day as his 72-year-old father stood on the summit of La Videmanette, at 7,000 feet above sea level, peering out, his back slightly arched, white cap, light beige coat, dark bermudas and hiking boots, thick white socks rolled around the ankles. In his hands lay the little Band-Aid box he’d been using for decades to store his butterflies. With the alpine meadows and patches of pine trees behind him, he stood contemplating the horizon, observing, perhaps, the miniature details of the nearby town of Rougemont as the sun formed speckles on his forehead and the left side of his nose…"
[From Prologue to Nabokov, or The Invention of Happiness]