WOMEN WITHOUT MEN Longlisted for International Booker Prize 2026

Photo by Rory Conlin

Feminist Press is excited to announce that Women Without Men, written by Shahrnush Parsipur and translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Published by Feminist Press in 2012, Women Without Men is a defiant, evocative depiction of women breaking repressive traditions and escaping suffocating expectations in 1950s Iran.

Here are the judges’ thoughts about Parsipur’s groundbreaking novella: 

“Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.”

A new edition of Women Without Men will be published by Penguin International Writers on March 12th, 2026. You can order our edition here.