About Lila Azam Zanganeh
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| Photo © Hank Gans |
Lila Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to teach literature, cinema and Romance languages at Harvard University.
Since 2002, she has been a contributor to Le Monde and has been published in The New York Times, The Internatitonal Herald Tribune, The Nation, The Paris Review, and La Repubblica. In 2006, she edited a collection of narrative essays on Iran. Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, has just been published by Norton in the United States, Penguin in England, L'Olivier in France, Contact in Holland, and L'Ancora del Mediterraneo in Italy. In 2012, it will be published by Duomo Ediciones in Spain. She is currently at work on a novel titled The Orlando Inventions.
Lila is fluent in six languages and serves on the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee. She is the recipient of the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, awarded each year by the Center for Fiction. She writes and lives in New York City.
"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 The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness]