Kenneth Glad
The death of a major artist has renewed attention on a work that brought personal history into public view. Her books and films made private experience part of a wider conversation about power and exile.
Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian artist, filmmaker and author whose graphic memoir Persepolis became a landmark account of growing up after Iran’s 1979 revolution, has died today, aged 56.
Le Monde reports that people close to Satrapi said she had “died of sadness” after the death of her husband, the Swedish producer Mattias Ripa, on April 8, 2025.
A memoir reached millions
Born in Rasht in 1969 and raised in Tehran, Satrapi left Iran as a teenager after her parents sent her to Europe.
According to The Guardian, she moved to France in 1994 and became a French citizen in 2006.
Persepolis, published in 2000, used stark black-and-white drawings to tell a coming-of-age story shaped by revolution, repression and exile.
Its impact helped expand the global audience for graphic memoirs, showing how comics could carry serious political memory without losing intimacy.
Satrapi told the British newspaper that the book was meant to make Western readers see Iranians as “actually human beings like us”.
The story moved to film
The animated film version of Persepolis, co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, won the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, according to Le Monde.
Satrapi later directed other films, including Radioactive, the 2019 drama about Marie Curie starring Rosamund Pike.
Explaining her chosen medium, she told The Guardian: “Drawing – it’s the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words.”
Iran remained central
Satrapi stayed publicly critical of Iran’s clerical leadership.
Le Monde writes that in January 2025 she refused France’s Légion d’Honneur, citing what she called French “hypocrisy” over Iran and visa policy for dissidents.
In 2024, she helped create Woman, Life, Freedom, a collaborative graphic work about protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody.
“The only thing I can do is cultural work … This book is a message to the Iranian people to say, listen, you are not alone,” she told The Guardian.
Sources: The Guardian, Le Monde
