Asian Women in History
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in 1967 in London but raised in South Kingstown, RI by her father, a librarian, and her mother, a teacher. She graduated with a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College; and from Boston University she has received an M.A. in English, and M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design and has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Three of Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Agni, Epoch, The Louisville Review, Harvard Review, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, came out in early 1999, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the O. Henry Award, a Transatlantic Review award from the Henfield Foundation in 1993, and a fiction prize from The Louisville Review in 1997. Her second novel, The Namesake (2003), is the basis for a new film directed by Mira Nair, which opens on March 9th in New York city. She was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was named one of the "20 best young fiction writers in America" in The New Yorker's summer 1999 fiction issue.
Aung San Suu Kyi, a Noble Peace Laureate of 1991, was cited by the Nobel Committee as "one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades." She was educated at Delhi University and Oxford University. She has won numerous awards and honors in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, most notably the Rafto Human Rights Prize and the Sakhorov Prize. She is the general secretary and leader of Burma's National League for Democracy and was placed under house arrest, for six years, by the military junta in July of 1989 for her activities.
Aung San Suu Kyi traveled extensively throughout the country, giving hundreds of speeches often to crowds of thousands, in an attempt to unite the people and reinstill their courage in achieving their long-sought goal of freedom. She was loved and revered by the Burmese people in their's country's time of darkness.
In courageous defiance of the military edict forbidding gatherings of more than four, people turned out in mass to listen to Aung San Suu Kyi wherever she spoke.One of her most famous speeches is the "Freedom From Fear" speech, which begins:
"It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."
Shirin Ebadi is a human rights and democracy activist, and a lawyer, who was awarded 2003's Nobel Peace Prize. She is the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize. She is also the first woman in the history of Iranian justice to have served as a judge. Her outspoken campaigns for democracy and greater rights for Iranian women and children have often brought her into conflict with conservative clerics.
Both in her research and as an activist, she is known for promoting peaceful, democratic solutions to serious problems in society. She takes an active part in the public debate and is well-known and admired by the general public in her country for her defence in court of victims of the conservative faction's attack on freedom of speech and political freedom. Ebadi represents Reformed Islam, and argues for a new interpretation of Islamic law which is in harmony with vital human rights such as democracy, equality before the law, religious freedom and freedom of speech.
Ebadi is an activist for refugee rights, as well as those of women and children. She is the founder and leader of the Association for Support of Children's Rights in Iran. As a lawyer, she has been involved in a number of controversial political cases. She was the attorney of the families of the writers and intellectuals who were victims of the serial murders in 1999-2000. She has worked actively - and successfully - to reveal the principals behind the attack on the students at Tehran University in 1999 where several students died. As a consequence, Ebadi has been imprisoned on numerous occasions. She is a popular figure in Iran and also she's a key figure in reformist movement and like many other key figures in the movement she's been harassed by the conservative forces who control the judiciary.
Time Magazine named Ebadi one of 2004's top 100 most influential people.
