Nazila Fathi

If I were to win the lottery, I would not know what to do with the money. But the Nieman Fellowship was my lottery, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the prize.

Starting a new life in exile, in many ways meant starting from scratch. No matter how good my background was, what work I had done, I needed to develop new contacts and find the right place for me. Harvard was the perfect jumping-board.

I had worked as a journalist for 19 years, most of it as a reporter for The New York Times based in Iran. But when the massive pro-democracy protests broke out in June 2009, I became a target. My house came under surveillance. Sixteen thuggish-looking men, in shabby clothes and bushy beards, watched my apartment building for several days from 8 a.m. to midnight. I first noticed them when I pulled out of my driveway and saw two cars and two motorcycles following me. I drove around the block with my escort, went home and didn’t leave again until after midnight three days later, on July 1.

I went to the airport with my two young children and husband and fled to my second home, Toronto, where I hold Canadian citizenship. It was only weeks after I left that I learned from friends who had been released from prison that the government had fabricated a story blaming me, the longest-serving reporter for an American news organization, of helping stir the protest. I had left before they issued an arrest warrant amidst the chaos of the time. I never returned.

From Canada, I continued to cover Iran for The New York Times from Toronto for another year. But it was not a long-term solution for life in exile. I needed to start again, find a new job and build a new home. Ten years had passed since I finished my graduate degree at University of Toronto. I needed to expand my capabilities, learn new skills, and perhaps get out of journalism and use my knowledge in different work.

At Harvard, I took courses in social media to become more competent in the new medium, attended literature and writing courses to meet the higher language standards of others I had to compete with. A course in public speaking gave me the confidence to speak before large audiences, which I was doing more often. I immersed myself in readings for a course on “Geopolitics of Energy,” the curse that has plagued my part of the world for nearly a century and provided an outpouring of cash for one dictator after another.

While some of my fellows enjoyed more relaxed and fun courses or took ballet and music lessons, I had to remind myself to stay focused. They had jobs; I worried that my career of two decades was in a limbo if I failed to find my path.

A year has passed since I started my Nieman journey that ended in May. I am still at the beginning of my path, but I have certainly landed on the right one.

Strangely, the last thing I expected was to find the friendships my family and I had lost. Soon we realized that my fellow Nieman Fellows were our new family. My six year-old daughter and seven-and-half year-old son have pinned our world map in six different colors: Phnom Penh, London, Paris, Rome, and South Pasadena are now places they want to visit to reunite with their Nieman friends.

Nazila Fathi
2011 Nieman Fellow

Nazila will begin a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School in January 2012.