Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian artist and graphic novelist best known for her acclaimed memoir Persepolis, has died at the age of 56. Family members told French news agency AFP that she 'died of sadness' following the death of her husband, Swedish producer Mattias Ripa, last year.
Ripa died on 8 April 2023. Later that month, messages on Satrapi's Instagram account read: 'For I lost the love of my life.' Tributes have poured in from across French politics and culture. President Emmanuel Macron called her 'a great artist who turned her Iranian childhood into a universal tale,' while National Assembly president Yaël Braun-Pivet said she 'had turned her work into an act of freedom.'
Born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran, Satrapi was raised in Tehran and sent to Europe as a teenager to escape the restrictions of the Islamic Republic. She settled in France in 1994 and became a French citizen in 2006. In 2000, she published Persepolis, a comic book memoir that became an international phenomenon, selling millions of copies and challenging Western assumptions about Iran.
Satrapi later co-directed the animated film adaptation of Persepolis, earning an Oscar nomination for best animated feature, the first woman to do so. She went on to direct five feature films, including Radioactive (2019) starring Rosamund Pike. In 2024, she returned to comics with Woman, Life, Freedom, a collaborative work examining the protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.
