Iran

Iran: Empire, Faith, and Revolution is a sweeping history of Iran from the first farmers of the Zagros to the "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising of 2022. Blending narrative drive with serious scholarship, it follows the people of the Iranian plateau across 10,000 years of empire, invasion, reform, and resistance.

Beginning with Elam and the rise of the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great and Darius I, the book traces how Persian ideas of kingship, law, religion, and identity shaped-and were reshaped by-the Greeks, Parthians, Sasanians, Arabs, Mongols, Timurids, Safavids, Qajars, and Pahlavis. It shows how Iran moved from imperial Persia to modern nation-state, from Shi'a Safavid revolution to the constitutional movement, from the oil nationalisation of Mossadegh to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the long Iran-Iraq War.

Far from a simple "East vs. West" story, Iran: Empire, Faith, and Revolution reveals a civilisation that repeatedly absorbed foreign conquerors, retooled global religions, and reinvented its political order. Readers follow the rise of the Islamic Republic, the post-Khomeini struggle over reform and authority, the Green Movement, sanctions and the nuclear crisis, and the turbulent Ahmadinejad and Rouhani years.

The final chapters confront contemporary Iran head-on: the Mahsa Amini protests, Generation Z's digital resistance, the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, and Iran's shifting place between Russia, China, the West, and the wider Middle East. Throughout, the book asks how a civilisation this old keeps remaking itself-and what that means for Iran's future.

Clear, accessible, and deeply sourced, Iran: Empire, Faith, and Revolution is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Iran beyond headlines: students and scholars of Middle Eastern history, policy makers and journalists, and general readers curious about how an ancient civilisation became one of the most contested-and consequential-states of the 21st century.

I was born in Varna, Bulgaria, on the edge of the Black Sea - a place where history is never really "past". Growing up between old empires and new borders, I was surrounded by stories of wars, occupations, disappearances and sudden changes of flag.

Later I moved to Warsaw, Poland, where I studied history and public relations at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Warsaw is a city built on ruins and memories, and it forced me to ask one question over and over again:

Why is so much of our most important history told in the most boring way possible?

From dry facts to living stories

Like every history student, I spent endless hours buried in heavy academic books - dates, treaties, footnotes stacked on footnotes. I respected the work, but I often felt like the life had been drained out of the events themselves.

That changed when I discovered Ryszard Kapuściński. His books had that rare tone I'd been searching for: history and politics told through people, scenes and atmosphere. It was factual, but it breathed.

From that moment I knew what I wanted to do: take serious history and tell it with the clarity and tension of a documentary - so future generations don't have to suffer through dead, lifeless books to understand the past.

What I write about

My books focus on the places where power is most visible - and most hidden:

• Wars and battles
• Espionage and cyber conflict
• Country histories

Some books are big, sweeping national histories. Others zoom in on a single battle, uprising or covert operation. All of them try to answer the same question: What really happened here, and what does it mean for the people who had to live through it?

How I tell history

If you read my books, you can expect narrative, scene-by-scene storytelling - not just lists of dates. Serious research from archives, memoirs, official reports and investigative journalism. Clear explanations of complex events like cyberattacks and proxy wars. And a refusal to simplify messy, uncomfortable truths.

I don't write official history. I don't write propaganda. I write stories that are honest, human and readable - the kind of books I was always looking for as a student and rarely found.

If you care about how we got from trenches and partitions to cyberwar and drone strikes - and you don't want to fall asleep over another textbook - I wrote these books for you.