Part memoir, part exposé, part cookbook, “The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club” reveals the hidden lives of women dissidents in the Islamic Republic.

By Robin Wright

The New Yorker

The Evin House of Detention, in Tehran, is among the world’s most infamous prisons. It was built by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, to hold around three hundred political prisoners, including some of the ayatollahs who campaigned against the monarchy. After the 1979 Revolution, Iran’s theocracy expanded the gruesome compound, which includes gallows and an execution yard. It now holds fifteen thousand people.

During reporting trips to Iran, I sometimes stayed nearby, at the former Hilton—renamed the Esteghlal, or the Independence Hotel—in what was an otherwise upscale and leafy neighborhood in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. I got nervous just driving by Evin. I had friends, including Americans, who were jailed there, usually in Ward 209. It housed political prisoners who were often detained on illusory charges, such as “spreading corruption on earth” and “enmity against God,” or ill-defined offenses like propaganda against the Islamic state. There are solitary-confinement cells without beds or toilets. Across the prison, wards are crammed with wall-to-wall double or triple-decker bunks. Even whispering can be punishable. Ward 209 has been a repository for detainees leveraged as pawns in Iran’s sadistic foreign policy. Journalists, diplomats, academics, businessmen, and environmentalists have been traded in lopsided deals for weaponry and money.

Sepideh Gholian, a thirty-year-old activist, details the desperation of prison life in Iran—and pays tribute to other female inmates—in an unusual, haunting new book called “The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes.” Gholian, once known for her blue hair, has been imprisoned three times since 2018. The first time, she was arrested for acting as an amateur publicist for laborers who were striking to protest unpaid wages at a sugarcane factory. She was forced to confess on national television to crimes against the state, which included having ties to an unlikely combination of the first Trump Administration and communist groups. After being released on bail, Gholian detailed the beatings, interrogations that lasted days and nights, sexual taunts, and death threats that she endured. She was arrested again; she spent more than four years in Evin.

In 2023, Gholian joyously walked out of Evin, removed her hijab, revealing wavy hair, and shouted condemnations of Iran’s Supreme Leader to bystanders. “Khamenei the tyrant, we’re going to put you in a grave!” she yelled. A video of the protest went viral. She was sent back to Evin within twenty-four hours. She’s now been there for more than six years in total, and has become one of the most famous activists and political prisoners in Iran, which is currently jailing more female writers than any other country, the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based group, reported last week. “Poets and writers are not criminals—they are the moral memory of a nation,” the report said. “When a government targets its writers and poets, it wages war on culture itself, and reveals the depth of its insecurity.”

“The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club” is part memoir, part exposé, and part cookbook. Chapters include heart-wrenching accounts of other women inmates’ past lives, and of their physical and psychological torture in prison, including coerced vaginal tests. The inmates brace themselves for these encounters based on the pace of the prison guards’ steps and smells. Their stories are mixed with brief respites: they bake pastries for one another. “You might well ask Isn’t prison . . . prison? How the hell could you be making confectionery there?” Gholian writes. “But if baking badly is an inalienable part of who you are, then you can do it anytime, anywhere, and—yes—in any kind of prison.”

In 2024, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian British woman who worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation and was jailed in Evin for six years, said that prisons were reluctant to give women basic rights, but “we were determined to fight for them.” She went on, “We fought for everything, from convincing them to give us a weekly mother-and-baby visit to raising money to buy an oven for the ward so we could bake our own bread which was not drugged with sedatives. Our power against them sometimes surprised ourselves as much as them.” (Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who had a toddler at the time of her arrest, had been in Iran to visit her parents during Nowruz, the Persian New Year.)

Gholian recounts her own campaign—alongside Niloufar Bayani, a wildlife biologist who was sentenced to ten years for espionage—to get cooking utensils. “They were plainly not going to release us so we were going to get a tart tin out of them, at least,” she writes.

Iran’s prison system, as in many other countries, is corrupt. Rich or famous prisoners have manipulated the system to bring in televisions, furniture, even what are locally known as “temporary” wives for sex. Prisoners often leave their goods behind upon release. Gholian managed to set up a piece-meal kitchen. Amid her tragic accounts, she provides recipes for sixteen delicacies, including tres leches cake, cream puffs, scones, and lemon-meringue pie. She often suggests whimsical ways—for those who are free—to eat them. Her recipe for apple pie is dedicated to Maryam Akbari Monfared, a mother of three whose three brothers and one sister were executed in a massacre of some five thousand political prisoners, in 1988. She was imprisoned on a charge of “enmity against God,” in 2009, for contacting an Iranian opposition group. Seven years later, while still in prison, she issued an open-letter demanding justice for her siblings. At the end of the recipe, Gholian recommends putting on a song. “Bob your head in time with the music” and lip-sync the words. When the pie is ready, “dance a while longer. If you have a companion, whirl around together and then tuck in with a cup of tea. If you don’t know any dances, watch a couple of videos online. There’s no need to be professional. Toss your head, rejoice.”

The text of the book was snuck out of Evin, in scraps, by unnamed allies. The pieces were passed to Maziar Bahari, an Iranian Canadian documentarian who was himself detained in Evin for a hundred and eighteen days during the Green Movement protests. (Jon Stewart made his directorial début filming Bahari’s harrowing prison account, titled “Rosewater,” for the scent of his prison guard.) Bahari now heads IranWire, a news website, in London. “For security reasons, I cannot tell you exactly how I received the different chapters of this book,” Bahari writes, in the introduction. “All you need to know is that it took several people and multiple phone calls with different individuals, including Sepideh, to receive separate chapters by text or photos showing scraps of paper.” Bahari’s team at IranWire typed up the passages and then had to figure out how to fit them together. The English-language edition, Bahari told me last month, made Gholian’s stories “much more bearable” than the original Farsi manuscript. For example, the word rosvaee, or رسوایی, translates in English as “disgrace” or “scandal.” But in Persian, notably in Khuzestan, Sepideh’s home province, it implies immoral conduct that can lead to so-called honor killings of females by their own families. “Thousands of women have been murdered by their fathers and brothers because of scandals,” Bahari said >>>