Nemat's grandmothers were both Russian, and she was brought up in a
Russian Orthodox Christian family in
Tehran. Both her grandmothers had, with their Iranian husbands whom they had married before the
Russian Revolution of 1917, fled from Russia to Iran as part of the massive
wave of migration that had started. Her father worked as a dance teacher, her mother as a hairdresser. She was a high school student when the secularizing monarchy of
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by
Ayatollah Khomeini's
Islamic Revolution. As a student Marina Nemat opposed the oppressive policies of the new Islamic government, attended demonstrations and wrote anti-revolutionary articles in a student newspaper. She was rescued by a prison guard, who also obtained commutation of her sentence to life imprisonment. However, after five months of imprisonment, it became clear that the guard had developed an attachment to Nemat and intended to force her to marry him. They escaped to Canada in 1991 and have two sons. Nemat worked at the
Aurora franchise of the
Swiss Chalet restaurant chain, and wrote her life story in 78,000 words. and regularly speaks about her experiences in front of high-school classes, universities, libraries, and associations. She is a regular participant in the
Oslo Freedom Forum. In 2012 she was a guest speaker at the San Francisco Freedom Forum of the
Human Rights Foundation along with
Aung San Suu Kyi and others. She is a graduate of the certificate program in creative writing at the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto. Marina sits on the Board of Directors at the CCVT (Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture) and Vigdis, a Norwegian charitable organization that provides legal and other forms of assistance to female political prisoners around the world. In addition, she is the chair of the Writers in Exile Committee at
PEN Canada, a member of the International Council of the Oslo Freedom Forum, and has been a volunteer at her church’s Refugee Committee since 2010. ==Literary Career==