For the Sun After Long Nights

*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION*
IN SEPTEMBER 2022, in response to the death of Mahsa Jîna Amini in police custody, after being arrested and beaten for not wearing her hijab properly, thousands of Iranians - mostly women - 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, Fatemeh Jamalpour joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran's religious extremist regime. Meanwhile, Nilo Tabrizy was covering the protests from New York, knowing that spotlighting the brutality of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to her birth country.
Though they had only met once, united by sisterhood and shared purpose, Nilo and Fatemeh corresponded constantly as they worked to shed light on what was happening on the ground. For the Sun After Long Nights is their extraordinary and deeply moving chronicle of the spirit and legacy of this historic movement, as well as the history, geopolitics and influences that led to this pivotal moment.

Nilo Tabrizy is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post's Visual Forensics team where she covers Iran using open source methods. Previously, she worked as a video journalist at the New York Times, covering Iran, race and policing, and abortion access, and at Vice News covering drug policy and harm reduction. She is a winner of the Front Page Award for Online Investigative Reporting (2022), the POY 79 Award of Excellence (2021), the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award (2016), a finalist for the 2025 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, and an Emmy nominee. 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.
Fatemeh Jamalpour is an Iranian journalist who has been interrogated, arrested, and jailed by the Iranian regime for her reporting on political unrest, state repression, and grassroots activism. Now living in exile in the United States, her work has appeared in the Sunday Times, The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times and Al Jazeera. Previously, she worked with the BBC World News in London and Shargh newspaper in Tehran. She has two master's degrees in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago and Allameh University in Tehran. Fatemeh was a 2024-25 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.