Shusha Guppy

Shusha Guppy was a singer, a writer and an editor.

She was born in Teheran in 1935. As she was only 17, she was sent to Paris to study philosophy and Oriental languages. Once there, she encounterd the intellectual elite of the 50's: Louis Aragon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and befriended with Jacques Prévert. Incidentally he encouraged her to record her first albums.

In the 60's she moved to London. She continued to be a singer, became a writer, a filmmaker and a commentator on relations between the West and the Islamic world. She died  on March 2008.

Shusha Guppy

Books 

The Blindfold Horse: Memoirs of a Persian Childhood

Her first book, The Blindfold Horse: Memoirs of a Persian Childhood. was published in 1988. She evokes the magic, cultural tradition and social fabric of her youth in Iran, recalling her community through warmly humorous yet unsentimental anecdotes. She describes how Persia was before the excesses of the last Shah led to his overthrow, with an Islamic way of life without dogmatism or fanaticism.This book was highly praised, winning the Yorkshire Post Prize, a prize from the Royal Society of Literature, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the Grand Prix Littéraire de Elle.

A Girl in Paris

Paris became the subject of a second volume of memoirs, A Girl in Paris published in 1991. Guppy reflects upon her formative years as a student and aspiring performer in 1950s Paris. Relatively obscure characters--an elegant Iranian diplomat who arranges the initial phase of Guppy's sojourn in France, the girls at her foyer residence, a music teacher with a tragic secret--mingle in these pages with the famous: poet and lyricist Jacques Prevert, whose discovery of Guppy launched her recording career; philosophers such as Albert Camus and Lucien Goldmann; literary figures Richard Wright and Samuel Beckett. While she is not the first writer to describe how Paris "became a state of mind which you carried with you for the rest of your life," as an Iranian-born woman Guppy explores this phenomenon from a fresh perspective. In combination with her storytelling abilities, her unique perspective enables her memoir to stand out in the genre.

The Secret of Laughter

Her last book, The Secret of Laughter published in 2006 is a magical collection of stories, gathered from the rich treasury of Persian folk and fairytales, tell of love and longing, fate and human ingenuity, loss and grace.  Shusha Guppy  used to think that although their sources have been lost over the ages, their memory runs through the collective psyche of the Iranian people.

The French Institute paid hommage to "one of the most talented women of her generation" who used to be a great supporter of the Institute