For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising

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.

NILO TABRIZY is a video reporter for The Washington Post’s Visual Forensics team where she covers Iran using open source investigative 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) 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 feminist journalist, banned from ＂producing any kind of content＂ inside her country by the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic Regime. Currently a Knight Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan, Jamalpour has worked as a freelancer for The Sunday Times and the Paris Review. Before that, she worked at BBC World newsroom in London, and as a freelance Documentary Filmmaker and Correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Tehran. She has two master’s degrees in journalism and communication from Northwestern University and Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran.