The first recipient of the newly established Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Prize is Farkhondeh Hajizadeh, an Iranian publisher who is also a writer, poet, and the editor of two literary journals.

Farkhondeh Hajizadeh was born in 1953 in the village of Bezanjan Baft, and was one of the few girls who received an elementary education in the village school. She was married at the age of 13 and had her first child when she was 14. After the birth of her second child, she resumed her studies and eventually became a librarian in the Ministry of Education in the city of Kerman. She moved to Tehran in 1992, where she became a member of the Children's Book Council. She soon began writing articles, literary criticism, stories and poems for leading publications.

Ms. Hajizadeh launched her publishing career in 1993, when she and her son Pejman Soltani received a permit from the Ministry of Guidance to establish Vistar Publications. Since then, they have published over 60 books, mainly in art, music, contemporary literature, and education despite constant pressure from the Ministry of Guidance. Many Vistar books have been banned before publication; many more have been banned and destroyed immediately after they were printed, a tactic calculated to cripple publishers financially. Permits to publish are routinely withheld, sometimes delaying publication for years. The process is Orwellian: in one case, her literary journal Baya was targeted when she printed a photograph of prominent poet Forough Farrokhzad without a headscarf; Ms. Farrokhzad died in 1967, before the headscarf was mandatory. Vistar has survived threats and extreme economic pressure, and in 2001 Ms. Hajizadeh and her brother started a second publishing company. That company, too, is pressing for permits to publish banned literary works.

She continues to publish despite personal evidence of how dangerous literary activity can be in Iran. In 1998, her brother Hamid Hajizadeh, a poet, was murdered in his sleep along with his 10 year-old son in a brutal case of what came to be known as the serial killings of writers and intellectuals. Ms. Hajizadeh had been working closely with lawyer and writer Nasser Zarafshan to bring to justice the elements in the government who ordered the killings when Zarafshan, an Honorary Member of PEN American Center, was jailed last year.