Ramita Navai

Early life

Ramita Navai was born in Tehran, Iran. She moved permanently to London, United Kingdom, with her family when the Iranian Revolution started. She attended Putney High School.

Career

After a postgraduate degree in journalism at City University, London, where she won the Broadcast Journalism Training Council Young Journalist of the Year award, Navai worked as the Tehran correspondent for The Times from 2003–06, where she covered events including the Bam earthquake, and parliamentary and presidential elections. She has reported from more than thirty different countries, including reporting for the UN in Iran, Pakistan and Iraqi Kurdistan. She has made twenty documentaries for Channel 4’s award-winning current affairs series Unreported World. For ITN / Channel 4 News she has made various features, including investigating child trafficking in India, police killings of gang members in Brazil, and the drug "paco" in the slums of Argentina. More recently she has reported from Macedonia (2015), and Iraq (2017). She has written for many publications including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent, the New Statesman, The Irish Times. In September 2014 she appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In 2012 she won an Emmy award for her undercover report from Syria for PBS's Frontline.

Her report "Macedonia: Tracking Down the Refugee Kidnap Gangs" won the London Foreign Press Association for News Story of the Year: TV award, the Royal Television Society for The Independent Award, and was nominated for the Amnesty International Media Award for News Story of the Year.

City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran

City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran was published in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in May 2014 and in the USA by PublicAffairs in September 2014. Based on extensive interviews and research City of Lies is an intimate portrait of modern Iran. It chronicles the lives of eight protagonists drawn from across the spectrum of Iranian society.

According to The Telegraph:

"City of Lies explodes the stereotypes of rebellious young Iranians doing drugs and attending raves, as it also challenges those about devotion-addled zealots who have benefited from the rise of religion after the revolution"

"Navai’s prose is startling. As they trudge up and down Vali Asr Street to work, eat, shop, pray, turn a trick, Navai’s characters observe the wrecked beauty of the world around them. Through these observations, the book is elevated far above typical reportage. She picks up snatches of songs, poems, billboard propaganda and is quick to find the knife and turn the blade on the hypocrisy of the city she knows so well."

"One regime billboard advises: 'Let’s not spend too much time discussing society’s problems in our homes.' As Bjian, her young gangster, drives to his meth lab, he listens to the music group Anonymous Sinners sing a satire of a famous old war song: 'There’s no prostitution, no drugs, press freedom, food and jobs, oil money for everyone, people are so happy they never complain…' But in the course of the book we discover that complaining in Iran is de rigueur; an art form, even""

The demands of secrecy pervade every aspect of city life. Many people are trying to find a way to endure the challenges of poverty and an oppressive regime. The government is cutting down the sycamores on Vali Asr in the dead of night. No one knows why they do it at night, other than to avoid the voice of protest rising from the streets of Tehran. In Navai’s energetic, eloquent book, these protests are sometimes a mumble, sometimes a scream."

City of Lies won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction, and Debut Political Book of the Year at the Political Book Awards 2015.

Reviews

Eliza Griswold, The Telegraph:

One of the world’s most exciting cities, as revealed by one of journalism’s most exciting women. Navai slips effortlessly into the boots of earthy, urban writer to tour Tehran’s ripped backsides in this intimate, grand guignol debut.
She transports us through the Iranian capital’s multiple personas with deft and knowing navigation: never short of love for even the lowliest of her fellow Tehranis. An intimate and devoted portrait, lifting a beautiful truth from a city masked in lies.

Jon Stewart, The Daily Show:

Navai’s prose is startling ... Navai’s characters observe the wrecked beauty of the world around them. Through these observations, the book is elevated far above typical reportage. She picks up snatches of songs, poems, billboard propaganda and is quick to find the knife and turn the blade on the hypocrisy of the city she knows so well.

Shappi Khorsandi, comedian:

This gripping book is a mosaic of such glimpses into a very different world ... the chapters read like utterly compelling short tales, catapulting us imaginatively into the hearts and minds of people we feel we know.

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