For the Sun After Long Nights

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A moving exploration of the 2022 women-led protests in Iran, as told through the interwoven stories of two Iranian journalists “Unlike anything I’ve read . . . A searing, courageous, and ultimately beautiful book filled with the spirit of the movement that it covers.” —Ben Rhodes, author of The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the Islamic Republic’s dress code. Her death galvanized thousands of Iranians—mostly women—who took to the streets in one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades: the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Despite the threat of imprisonment or death for her work as a journalist covering political unrest, state repression, and grassroots activism in Iran—which has led to multiple interrogation sessions and arrests—Fatemeh Jamalpour joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran’s religious extremist regime. And across the globe, Nilo Tabrizy, who emigrated from Iran with her family as a child, covered the protests and state violence, knowing that spotlighting the women on the front lines and the systemic injustice of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to Iran in the future. Though they had met only once in person, Nilo and Fatemeh corresponded constantly, often through encrypted platforms to protect Fatemeh. As the protests continued to unfold, the sense of sisterhood they shared led them to embark on an effort to document the spirit and legacy of the movement, and the history, geopolitics, and influences that led to this point. At once deeply personal and assiduously reported, For the Sun After Long Nights offers two perspectives on what it means to cover the stories that are closest to one’s heart—both in the forefront and from afar.

FATEMEH JAMALPOUR is a feminist freelance journalist banned from working in Iran by the Ministry of Intelligence. She has contributed to The Sunday Times, The Paris Review, and the Los Angeles Times and previously worked with BBC World News in London and Shargh newspaper in Tehran. Fatemeh was a 2024–25 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. NILO TABRIZY an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. She works for the Visual Forensics team, where she covers Iran using open-source methods. Previously, she was a video journalist at The New York Times, covering Iran, race and policing, abortion access, and more. She is an Emmy nominee and the 2022 winner of the Front Page Award for Online Investigative Reporting. Nilo received her M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University and her B.A. in Political Science and French from the University of British Columbia.