She is the author of several books, including an acclaimed memoir in English called Journey from the Land of No (Crown), Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic), and A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf).
Deeply influenced by both the longstanding literary traditions of her birth country and its historical turmoils, Roya Hakakian often draws her inspirations from highly political subjects and treats them with lyricism.
She takes on the most pressing and difficult contemporary sociopolitical issues —exile, persecution, censorship— and injects them with relevance and urgency through her deeply observant and poetic sensibility to make these subjects accessible to all readers.
After the return of Ayatollah Khomeini and the rise in anti-semitism as well as social and economic pressures and ongoing war with Iraq, she emigrated in May 1985, to the United States on political asylum.
Her memoir's publication was hailed by Yale University Professor Harold Bloom as the debut of a writer with "a major literary career."
[11] She has been a featured speaker at many colleges and universities as well as she has appeared on CBS This Morning, PBS' Now with Bill Moyers, The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC, among others.
[14] In granting the award, one Elle magazine jury member Danielle Bauter said, “Hakakian eloquently captures her childhood with words that create a dreamscape in the mind’s eye.
From the perspective of a teenager coming to terms with her own identity and the changing times around her, she juxtaposes the innocence of her youth with the fierceness of Iran’s political climate.
Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran has been a Freshman Experience Book at several colleges throughout the US and has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, and German.
She carefully pieces together, through eyewitness testimonies, police reports, archival documents, court evidence, and countless interviews, the story of the assassination of four Iranian and Kurdish leaders at a restaurant named Mykonos in Berlin, Germany in 1992.
The work marks the first time that a highly political event in contemporary Iranian history has been told in a nonfictional narrative form for general readers.
Roya Hakakian's beautiful book mercilessly exposes just one of these crimes, and stands as tribute to the courageous dissidents and lawyers who managed one of that rarest of human achievements; an authentic victory for truth and justice.
According to a review by Tunku Varadarajan for the Wall Street Journal, Hakakian's account is notable for its balance: "She offers counsel to readers, not commandments, and although her book could be seen as a love letter to America, it is one that’s been written by an exacting lover who isn’t blind to this country’s flaws.
"[22] In his review for The Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby wrote about the book, "Lyrical and perceptive, “A Beginner’s Guide to America” is an immigrant's love letter to the nation that took her in.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies around the world, including La Regle Du Jeu and Strange Times My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature,[24][25] which features works from over 40 writers who have contributed, "to this rich and varied collection—or, to use the Persian term, golchine, a bouquet—one that provides a much-needed window into a largely undiscovered branch of world literature.
[35] Hakakian has collaborated on over a dozen hours of programming for leading journalism units on network television, including 60 Minutes and on A&E's Travels With Harry, and ABC's Documentary Specials with Peter Jennings, Discovery and The Learning Channel.
[39] In 2020, Hakakian signed the controversial "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate," which appeared on July 7 in Harper's Magazine; other signatories include feminist Gloria Steinem, writer J.K. Rowling and linguist Noam Chomsky.