FaithWorld

A general view of Iran's late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's shrine with pictures of him and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran

GIJON, Spain – Nairi Nahapetian gets her own back on the Iranian regime which forced her into exile by writing a novel about the murder of a powerful religious leader.

Nahapetian returned to Iran as a journalist in 2005 but says that she had to turn to fiction to fully describe the complexities of the homeland she fled when she was nine.

“Thanks to fiction I can, for example, kill an ayatollah, which is something you cannot do in real life,” Nahapetian said at the “Semana Negra” crime-writing festival, attended by a million people every year in Gijon, northern Spain.

In “Qui a tue l’Ayatollah Kanuni” (Who killed Ayatollah Kanuni), Narek, an exiled journalist who returns to Iran, is in the wrong place at the wrong time when a religious leader is found dead. 

Reuters photo credit Raheb Homavandi

Read the full story by Martin Roberts here