She was President of the persian Writers’ Association and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 and 2002. In 2013, she was awarded the Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry. In early March 2010, she could not leave the country due to official prohibitions. As she was about to board a plane to Paris, police detained her and interrogated her “all night long”. She was released but without her passport. Her English translator (Farzaneh Milani) expressed surprise at the arrest as detention as Behbahani was then 82 and nearly blind, “we all thought that she was untouchable.”