Kamin writes a love letter to Iran and a book about loving yourself
Originally from Iran,
Kamin Mohammadi fled with her family to London in 1979 during the Islamic revolution, where she forged a career in the glam world of glossy newspapers.
She became not just a journalist but a writer and broadcaster passionate about the life-changing powers of food and lifestyle, home-producing olive oil from her chateau on the hill where she lives with her Italian husband and several litters of adorable puppies, flying regularly back and forth to the UK. Her first book The Cypress Tree: A Love Letter to Iran wa s i n s p i re d by re d i s c overing her Iranian identity.
In The Cypress Tree, she wrote about living in Iran and then fleeing to London, placing the stories against the background of historical events told through the stories of her vast family, examining the roots of the revolution in a non-partisan way that is rare in personal memoirs about this period. It placed her book first on a list of books that showed the “real” Iran behind the headlines. She wrote a major article and spoke about Iraqi gas attacks on Iran and the sufferings it caused for the Mail on Sunday. This was nominated for a Human Rights in Journalism Award by Amnesty International. This led her to do some propeace activism and she spoke at the joint Action Iran and CASMII meeting in London in 2006, among many other meetings. In reality the writing of that book was a story in itself. In 2008, Kamin Mohammadi found herself worn down - by the increasingly unrealistic expectations of her high-flying job in the magazine industry, by her fluctuating weight and health issues, and by her non-existent love life. Made redundant from her job, she fled to London for a friend’s apartment in Florence. There, among the cobbled streets, the markets and the palazzos, Kamin found a new lease of life. Leaving behind her ascetic diets and compulsive exercising, she began to imitate the ways of the carefree Italian women she saw a roun d h e r - th e m o r n i n g café rituals, the long lunches - taking pleasure in the finer things. Within weeks she had regained her health, her ral figure and her zest for life. Q What’s your name and where do you come from? Kamin Mohammadi. I am born and bred in Iran,