Akbar Ganji ( born 31 January 1960 in tehran) is an Iranian journalist and writer. He has been described as a "wildly popular pro-democracy journalist" who has crossed press censorship "red lines" regularly, and received "death threats from government-affiliated thugs almost daily. A supporter of the Islamic regime as a youth, he became dissenchanted in the mid-1990s and served time in Tehran's Evin Prison from 2001 to 2006 after publishing a series of stories on the murder of dissident authors known as the Chain Murders of Iran. While in prison he issued a manifesto which established him as the first "prominent dissident, believing Muslim and former regime supporter" to call for a replacement of Iran's theocratic system with "a islamic secular democracy." Ganji has won several international awards for his work, including the World Association of Newspapers' Golden Pen of Freedom Award ,the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression's International Press Freedom Award, the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, and the John Humphrey Freedom Award.