Shirin Nezammafi is an Iranian writer who writes in Japanese, although her native language is Farsi. Born in Tehran, Iran, in 1979, she moved to Japan as a young adult. Her debut novel Salam won the Ryugakusei-Bungakusho award in 2006. Nezammafi was the second non-Japanese writer (and the first from a country whose language does not use Chinese characters) to win the Bungakukai Shinjinsho Award, which she received in 2009 for her second novel White Paper. She was shortlisted for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2009 and 2010.