In the fall of 2003, James Lasdun taught a writing workshop at a university in New York City. One of the students in his class was a talented Iranian woman he, for reasons which will become obvious, pseudonymously calls “Nasreen’’ in this account.

Nasreen was writing a novel set during the fall of the shah, and amid the regular dreck of a writing workshop, her work stood out, even if the writer herself remained withdrawn in class.