BANNED BOOKS WEEK: Remembering Marjane Satrapi
BANNED BOOKS WEEK: Remembering Marjane Satrapi
“The only way to know if a person is a good or bad person is to know them.”
- Marjane Satrapi
Literature, and other works in pop culture, ask audiences to consider historical events and people that have been unfamiliar to them. It offers a conversation with lives outside of our own, often complicating a narrative that differs from popular opinion.
Banned Books Week 2026 runs from October 4 - 10 under the theme of “Let the Books Be. Protect the freedom to read.” PEN America reported over ten thousand instances of book bans in the 2025-2026 school year, impacting over 7,000 works and more than 4,000 writers and creatives.
For Banned Books Week event, we’d like to remember Marjane Satrapi, the French Iranian artist, writer, and filmmaker, who died on June 4, 2026 in Paris, France. Her contributions to storytelling remains considerable, spanning works such as Persepolis, Embroideries, Chickens with Plums, and Woman, Life, and Freedom. The author’s work had earned her international recognition, including the 2007 Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for the animated adaptation of Persepolis, which she co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, and two Cesar Awards in 2008 for best film and best adaptation. The film also received nominations for both the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and Golden Globe for best Foreign Language Film. In 2024, Marjane Satrapi received the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, recognizing her broader communications to culture and social commentary.
Storytellers like Marjane Satrapi and her work on Persepolis beautifully illustrate a value of that invitation. Published in two volumes beginning in 2003, The graphic memoir recounts her childhood and adolescence set in the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. Through the use of black-and-white illustrations paired with the writer’s characteristically humorous narrative, Persepolis examines how creator’s identity evolves through political repression, religion, family, and acts of war.
There is an irony that the work has encountered censorship itself and challenged in schools in the United States. A work concerned with the consequences of restricting expression consequently became the subject to restrictions of it’s own. Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis has been challenged in school across the United States since 2013, when Chicago public school administration pulled the work from classrooms over concerns of it’s graphic imagery and depictions of violence and torture in war. Censorship, however, has rarely been interested in irony and more concerned with what a reader is capable of understanding.
A similar contradiction to censorship surrounds Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the Pulitzer prize winning graphic memoir following his father’s survival of the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s work shows the tragic events of the war as depicted from the point of view of anthropomorphic animals, portraying the Germans as cats and the Jews as mice. Maus faced criticism in 2022, from a Tennessee school board that voted against it’s inclusion in the classroom curriculum over it’s depictions of nudity. Both Spiegelman and Satrapi’s works, amongst other creatives, highlight how graphic storytelling can confront difficult histories and conflicts through personal experience, and how some of those depictions can be found as reason for censorship.
Other challenged works include: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staple’s Saga, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Jaime Hewlett and Alan Martin’s Tank Girl, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir, Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thrones and Roses, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, among many other popular titles.
Marjane Satrapi’s collection of works reminds readers that history is not comprised of dates and events relating to famous figures, but a record of lives that lived through them as well. Persepolis showed her comedic style, perspective on contradictions, and general lifestyle that narratives may have gone undocumented otherwise. Her work endures as an invitation to consider passed our general assumption and relate to the people behind them. During Banned Books Week, we remember Marjane Satrapi, her storytelling, and the accessibility of reading it.
For readers interested in more information on book censorship, consider supporting the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, exploring Pen America and their work against book bans, Speigelmen’s interview with CNN on Maus being targeted by censorship, and Marjane Satropi and Art Speigleman in conversation with Pen America.
Works Cited
“Case Study: Persepolis.” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-persepolis/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2026.
“Censorship by the Numbers: Banned Books Data.” American Library Association, 20 Mar. 2023, www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data.
“Marjane Satrapi Obituary.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 June 2026, www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/09/marjane-satrapi-obituary.
“Marjane Satrapi, ‘Persepolis’ Author and Filmmaker, Has Died at 56.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 4 June 2026, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2026-06-04/marjane-satrapi-persepolis-author-filmmaker-has-died-at-56.
“Marjane Satrapi.” Marjane Satrapi - Fundación Princesa de Asturias, www.fpa.es/en/princess-of-asturias-awards/laureates/2024-marjane-satrapi/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2026.
Press, Associated. “Holocaust Novel ‘maus’ Banned in Tennessee School District.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 28 Jan. 2022, www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/holocaust-novel-maus-banned-in-tennessee-school-district.
A Spotlight on School Book Bans - Pen America, pen.org/report/book-bans-spotlight-2026/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2026.