Kennebunk Free Library and the Camden Conference present Afarin Bellisario at Kennebunk Free Library on Saturday, September 27, 2025 at 2 p.m.
Afarin Bellisario bridges East and West, Past and Present, and technology and human conditions. Born and raised in Tehran, she has built a career in high-tech after graduating with a PhD from MIT. Her debut novel, Silenced Whispers, is the winner of Independent Publishers of New England's silver medal for genre fiction. It celebrates the courage of a young woman to resist oppression and colonial aggression in WWI Iran. The book provides insight into Iran during that era and how that era seeded conflicts in modern Iran and the Middle East.
Grounded in the turn of the 20th century, Silenced Whispers is a historical fiction that highlights the internal and external pressures on young woman in Iran in the face of patriarchy and colonialism. Though historically and culturally unique, the tensions Bellisario explores echo across time and place offering the reader a world both familiar and removed. In navigating these tensions –internal/external, domestic/political, rural/urban, traditional/technological, past/present – the author wields magical realism in the Persian, Arabic, and European traditions to counterpoint, highlight, and progress the plot. The result is a timeless narrative that offers a little bit of something for everyone.
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