Recipes from an Iranian prison: ‘If there is one book that shows the power of words, it’s this one’

“Women are second-class citizens in Iran and in prison they are oppressed even more,” Maziar Bahari says. 

The Iranian journalist and film-maker is calling from his London home, recounting the tangle of events that led him to help edit and publish The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club, a remarkable prison memoir-cum-cookbook written by Sepideh Gholian, the 30-year-old political activist who has been in and out of Iranian jails since her first arrest in 2018. 

“It’s a dark and tragic experience, but Sepideh Gholian has done something brilliant by bringing food into her prison story,” Bahari says. “She bears witness to tragic circumstances and she also finds hope, which is miraculous.”

Read the feature in Hyphen.

[This piece was published on 08/04/25]