Marjane Satrapi, French-Iranian Author of Persepolis, Dies at 56

Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian author and illustrator of the graphic novel series Persepolis, died at the age of 56, the Élysée Palace in Paris confirmed Thursday. The palace said Satrapi captivated a global audience with Persepolis and called her a leading figure in French culture whose work carried a universal message.

Persepolis, first published in 2000, follows a young girl growing up in Tehran during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The 2007 film adaptation, which Satrapi co-directed, was nominated for best animated feature at the Oscars. A member of her close circle told AFP she died of sadness a little over a year after the death of her husband, Mattias Ripa. President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Satrapi as a great artist who transformed an Iranian childhood into a universal fable.

The palace added that with her childlike perspective, irony, tenderness, and inner demons, she created a deeply moving world with which readers identified. Satrapi studied for four years as a teenager at the Lycée Français de Vienne in Austria. She later earned a master's degree in visual communication from the Islamic Azad University in Tehran before moving to France, where she gained French nationality in 2006.

Last year she refused the French Legion of Honour over what she called her adopted country's hypocrisy in its dealings with Iran. She directed the films Poulet aux Prunes in 2011, La Bande des Jotas in 2012, The Voices in 2014, and Radioactive in 2019, and published the novel Embroideries.

Satrapi created the collection Woman, Life, Freedom about the 2022 protests in Iran that followed the death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest by morality police for not wearing her hijab properly.

Her parents had protested the regime's imposition of the hijab for women in 1983. In 2023 she led a protest outside the Iranian embassy in Paris in solidarity with five Tehran teenagers arrested for posting a TikTok video dancing to the song Calm Down. She told Deadline she had received threats and slurs from the regime regarding Persepolis and her activism.

"I've been called a liar and a spy. I've learned in life not to be scared," she said. "It's not that I'm fearless or careless but there are kids in my country who are being shot and they are 17 years old, while I have lived for more than half a century," she added.

"We artists must be humble but doing nothing is worse, being indifferent is worse," she said of the 2023 protest. President of the French National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet posted on X that France had lost an immense artist. She said Satrapi had turned her work into an act of freedom and given a face and a voice to the Iranian revolution.

Studio Canal UK posted a tribute remembering the brilliant and extraordinary artist and filmmaker behind Persepolis, noting that through the deeply personal film she gave audiences a story of identity, freedom, exile and resistance that continues to resonate across the world.

Satrapi told the BBC in 2024 that if you take the art and culture out from any society, this society falls down. She recently published a series of Instagram posts after her husband's death saying she had lost the love of her life.