Shusha Guppy

Early life

Her father, Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammad-Kāzem Assār (آيت الله العظمي سيد محمد کاظم عصار), was a distinguished Shia theologian and Professor of Philosophy at University of Tehran. At age 17 Shusha was sent to Paris, where she studied Oriental languages and philosophy, and also trained as an opera singer. In Paris she encountered artists, writers and poets such as Louis Aragon, Jose Bergamin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. She was encouraged by Jacques Prévert to record an album of Persian folk songs.

She married the writer and explorer Nicholas Guppy in 1961. They had two sons, Darius and Constantine Guppy, and were divorced in 1976. At the time of her marriage she moved to London, where she became fluent in English; she was already fluent in Persian and French. Guppy wrote articles for major publications in both Britain and America. She also began singing and acting professionally.

Singer

Guppy's first British release, in 1971, was an album of traditional Persian music, complementing her first album released in France fourteen years earlier. By now, influenced by the Folk Revival, she was writing and singing some of her own songs, as well as covering the works of many contemporary singer-songwriters. She gave successful concerts in Britain, America and continental Europe, and appeared on television and radio programmes. She gave concerts in the Netherlands and Belgium in 1975 with Lori Lieberman and Dimitri van Toren.

She contributed music (in collaboration with G.T. Moore) and narrated the 1973 documentary film Bakhtiari Migration - The sheep must live. In 1976 this film was more than doubled in length and her narration was replaced by James Mason and it was released as People of the Wind. The following year the film was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar and also for a Golden Globe. The film follows the annual migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari tribes in southern Iran. The soundtrack was later released in the USA. How much she contributed to the film is in dispute. According to Shusha Guppy herself: "What has saddened me, and frankly made me angry, is not the money — as I said I wanted to make the film and financial rewards were not my aim — but the fact that all the credits were taken from me on People of the Wind of which the idea, the production, and the text were mine."

Discography

All are vinyl LPs except where noted. The years given are for the first release.

Writer and editor

Guppy promoted Persian culture and history, and was a commentator on relations between the West and the Islamic world. Guppy's first book, The Blindfold Horse: Memoirs of a Persian Childhood, was published in 1988. It was highly praised, winning the Yorkshire Post Prize from the Royal Society of Literature, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Grand Prix Littéraire de Elle. The book describes a Persia before the excesses of Shah Reza Pahlavi led to his overthrow, describing a country with an Islamic way of life without dogmatism or fanaticism.

Her last book, The Secret of Laughter (2005), is a collection of Persian fairy tales from Iran’s oral tradition. Many had never previously been published in written form.

For twenty years, until 2005, she was the London editor of the American literary journal The Paris Review.

Bibliography

Obituaries