For the Sun After Long Nights

In 2022, in response to the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in police custody after being arrested for not wearing her hijab, thousands of Iranians – mostly women – took to the streets in protest. Fatemeh Jamalpour had just returned to the country after working in London and, despite the threat of imprisonment or death for her work as a journalist, joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran’s religious extremist regime.

Across the globe, Nilo Tabrizy, who emigrated from Iran with her family and was raised in Canada, was covering the protests and state violence in Iran, knowing that spotlighting the women on the frontlines and the systemic injustice of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to Iran in the future.

Though they had only met once in person, Nilo and Fatemeh corresponded constantly, often through encrypted platforms in order to protect Fatemeh’s privacy and security. As the protests continued to unfold, the sense of sisterhood they shared led them to embark on an effort to document the spirit and legacy of the movement, and the history, geopolitics, and influences that led to this point. At once deeply personal and assiduously reported, For the Sun After Long Nights offers two perspectives on what it means, as a journalist, to cover the stories that are closest to one’s heart – both from the frontlines and from afar.

Author Biography

Nilo Tabrizy is a video reporter for the Washington Post’s Visual Forensics team, having previously worked as a video journalist at the New York Times.Fatemeh Jamalpour is an Iranian journalist banned from ‘producing any kind of content’ inside her country by the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic.—————————————————-Nilo Tabrizy is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post’s Visual Forensics team where she covers Iran using open source methods. Previously, she worked as a video journalist at the New York Times, covering Iran, race and policing, and abortion access, and at Vice News covering drug policy and harm reduction. She is a winner of the Front Page Award for Online Investigative Reporting (2022), the POY 79 Award of Excellence (2021), the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award (2016), a finalist for the 2025 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, and an Emmy nominee. Nilo received her M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University and her B.A. in Political Science and French from the University of British Columbia.