Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.
Iranwire – Maziar Bahari used to feel sceptical when people talked of the way that books can change lives. Such statements always seemed like so much hyperbole to him, the Guardian newspaper writes.
But when Sepideh Gholian, one of Iran’s most famous political prisoners, came into his life, everything changed. “If anyone wants to know why writing matters, her book is the best example,” says Bahari, a London-based journalist, documentary maker and the founder of the news website IranWire.
“In its pages, she takes us to places that are out of the hands of the interrogators and the prison wardens. Writing empowers her. It allows her to think of things that are hers alone, and which no one can ever take away from her. It shows the power of literature to liberate the mind and the soul.”
On his phone, he plays me a seconds-long message from the 30-year-old, recorded on one of the mobiles that are periodically smuggled into Evin, the Tehran prison where she is held, which is best known in Britain as the place where Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was incarcerated.
In the clip, she is smiling broadly and whispering something – a barely audible whisper that is clearly highly practiced (prisoners are often required to be silent). Bahari shakes his head. “She’s so vivid, and it’s this – her laughter – that attracts me and millions of others to her story. She is an individual in a country where the regime wants the population to be one mass under the supreme leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei]. To be an individual in Iran is an act of resistance.”
Gholian, who is celebrated by a generation of younger Iranian women for once having bright blue hair, was born in Dezful, Khuzestan, in the south-west of Iran. In 2018, when she was still a student, she began helping to organise support for the Haft Tappeh sugarcane complex strike (since 2015, when the factory was privatised, workers had been fighting against job losses, unpaid wages and poor working conditions).
Although she was not a worker herself, Gholian reported on the strike, planned meetings and built solidarity in the community and beyond – until, during a peaceful protest, she was arrested, after which she was detained without trial for 30 days.
But Gholian was undaunted. On her release, she revealed to the world what had happened to her. She had, she said, been tortured. There were beatings and floggings, and during interrogation sessions lasting into the small hours, she was subjected to sexual insults and told that her family would receive information that would lead to her murder for so-called honour.
The public response to this was fierce – it was on her side – but it also brought the state broadcaster to air a documentary in which a distressed Gholian was seen “confessing” to crimes against the state. It also led to her rearrest and imprisonment. In 2023, she was again released, but almost immediately, footage of her denouncing Khamenei went viral (“you tyrant,” she said, “we’re going to put you in a grave”). A day later, she was arrested once more. She has been in prison ever since.
Bahari set up IranWire in 2013, following his own run-in with the Iranian regime: in 2009, he was imprisoned for 118 days, an experience recorded in his best-selling memoir Then They Came For Me.
To date, IranWire has helped to train some 6,000 citizen journalists inside Iran, and it was thanks to this network that he heard Gholian was writing a prison diary – a book IranWire published in Farsi in 2020.
“After that, she knew I was someone she could trust,” he says. “So we stayed in touch as much as possible, and then she told me she had an idea for a second book, this time about cooking.” Bit by bit, the text was sent to him. Even piecemeal, it was electrifying. Next month, it will be published in English as The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prison in 16 Recipes.
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