In the Mazandaran province of northern Iran, Asieh Amini grew up on a farm surrounded by kiwi and tangerine orchards. Born in 1974, Amini was the third of four sisters. When she was very young, her family, which came from the gentry of feudal times, owned animals and employed gardeners and housekeepers. In the north of Iran, women could own property, wield social power, and work on farms with their sleeves and their pants rolled up. But it was still common for men to have multiple wives, and because of this Amini’s extended family sprawled. Amini’s father was a teacher. Though he was a religious man, he wore his faith lightly. Amini was five in 1979, when revolution came. The monarchy fell; an Islamic Republic replaced it, with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as its leader, and for a decade Iran convulsed with violence and privation. First came internal conflict over the revolution’s spoils, and then an enormously costly war with Iraq. The Aminis, no longer able to afford the animals or the gardeners or the farmworkers in straitened times, became middle-class. Amini and her sisters spun themselves a cocoon of nature and literature. When they weren’t playing outdoors, they read, wrote stories, and painted. 

She was not allowed to wear white shoes or short socks at school. She thought the required dark hijab ugly, and she cried when she had to put it on, but her mother gently explained that this was a rule no one could disobey.

In 1993, Amini went to Allameh Tabataba’i University, in Tehran, to study journalism. Amini studied journalism at Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran. After taking a job at the newspaper Iran, Amini soon became the cultural editor of its youth supplement. It was a challenging job on its own, but the resentment she faced as a young, single woman from her male colleagues made the work even more difficult. editor-in-chief scrutinized her every move. She put her head down and worked harder. Her days were often fourteen hours long.

Amini began working at a paper called Zan, which covered women’s affairs. There, she met photojournalist Javad Montazeri and the two soon married. But in 1999, hardline clerics opposed the open press and swiftly shut down many news outlets, including Zan. 

After giving birth to her daughter, Ava, in 2000, Amini became an editor with a daily newspaper, Etemaad, as well as the manager of the website, “Women in Iran.” In 2004, Amini discovered a story from a small town in her native province that shocked her. A 16-year-old girl named Atefeh Sahaaleh had been hanged for committing “acts incompatible with chastity.” Amini investigated and found out that the girl had been neglected by her family and was repeatedly raped by a neighbor and other men beginning at age nine. The neighbor paid her to keep quiet and she used that money to survive. When she was 13, Iran’s morality police arrested her and a judge sentenced her to one hundred lashes, the legal punishment for sex outside of marriage. The law decreed that women could be sentenced to lashings three times – the fourth time, they would be executed. Amini was unaware of these laws, having grown up in circles where they were never enforced. Deeply disturbed by these events, Amini gathered evidence and wrote about Sahaaleh’s execution. International law prohibited the execution of anyone under the age of 18, but Iran’s legal code held girls criminally responsible at the age of nine, and boys at the age of 15. However, Amini’s newspaper wouldn’t publish her piece – the editor wasn’t willing to go up against Sharia law and the judiciary. Another newspaper also declined the piece before a women's publication finally agreed to publish an edited version.   Amini soon heard of another girl who was set to be hanged for alleged crimes against chastity: Leyla, a 19-year-old with diminished mental capacity, also a victim of child rape. The judge, in that case, told Amini that his job was simply to apply the law, which held that Leyla was a threat to family life because of her sexual availability. Amini enlisted her friend, human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr, to help Leyla’s case. In the meantime, Amini published her story in the women’s magazine Zanan and the case garnered international attention. Amini and Sadr eventually got Leyla out of prison and into the care of a young women’s organization in Tehran.  

Amini felt compelled to bring attention to the stories of girls facing execution for these supposed crimes and to do what she could to end the practice. Amini joined with women’s rights activists and together they sought to improve conditions for women by addressing the discriminatory nature of Iranian law.  

 In March 2007, Amini and 32 other women were arrested during a silent sit-in at the courthouse where women’s rights activists were on trial for a previous protest. During her interrogation, Amini realized the police had been investigating her. Amini was released five days later, sure that her phones were tapped and her movements tracked, but the efforts of SSF continued. Amini was flooded with reports of unjust executions across Iran. Eventually, the stress of her work caused her to suffer a kind of nervous shock that included headaches, vision problems, and muscle paralysis. While Amini recovered, her partners, who had been targeted even more severely by the police, reorganized SSF into an umbrella organization based outside Iran.  In 2009, Amini was one of many demonstrators beaten in the protests following the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She was soon warned that the police were questioning prisoners about her and that she should leave the country. Amini and her daughter were able to flee to Sweden under the auspices of a poetry festival to which she had been invited.  Amini eventually settled in Norway, aided by the International Cities of Refuge Network for writers facing persecution. While abroad, she has continued to advocate for the end to stoning and underage executions in Iran. She has published two books of Norwegian-language poems, Do not enter my dreams with a gun (2011) and I am missing you (2013). Amini has received accolades for her advocacy work including the Human Rights Watch’s Hellmann/Hammett award (2009); the Oxfam Novib/PEN award (2012); and the Ord I Grenseland prize (2014).