According to her autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis, she stayed in Vienna through her high school years, staying in friends' homes, but spent three months living on the streets. There she attended the Lycée Français de Vienne. In 1983, at the age of 14 Satrapi was sent to Vienna, Austria by her parents in order to flee the Iranian regime. There's nothing extremely special about that.' She added that due to this detail, most Iranian families would be, in the words of Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian, 'blue blooded.' If you multiply these kids by generation you have, I don't know, 10-15,000 princes. Satrapi said that 'But you have to know the kings of the Qajar dynasty, they had hundreds of wives. Satrapi's family are of distant Iranian Azeri ancestry and are descendants of Nasser al-Din Shah, Shah of Persia from 1848 until 1896.

According to Persepolis, one Scud hit the house next to hers, killing her friend and entire family. She experienced an Iraqi air raid and Scud missile attacks on Tehran. She attended the Lycée Français there and witnessed, as a child, the growing suppression of civil liberties and the everyday-life consequences of Iranian politics, including the fall of the Shah, the early regime of Ruhollah Khomeini, and the first years of the Iran-Iraq War. Satrapi grew up in Tehran in a family which was involved with communist and socialist movements in Iran prior to the Iranian Revolution. Apart from her native tongue Persian, she speaks English, Swedish, German, French and Italian.

Marjane Satrapi (Persian: مرجان ساتراپی) is an Iranian-born French contemporary graphic novellist, illustrator, animated film director, and children's book author.

Satrapi the complete persepolis