An uncaged heart

After more than two years in Iranian jails, Kylie Moore-Gilbert has forged a new life that's brimming with love, and a determination to help others who have been wrongfully imprisoned.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s remarkable memoir of the 804 days she spent wrongfully imprisoned in Iran ends with her boarding a plane and flying home to Melbourne. The academic’s harrowing time in filthy, dangerous Qarchak prison, and the even more sinister solitary confinement cells of Evin prison, was widely reported on, and Kylie’s 400-page book is a visceral and moving account of the limits of human endurance. Because of this, I’m surprised when she reveals something new. After she was finally freed from the cruel guards, the privation and constant surveillance, she had to go straight back into isolation in Australia, due to the two week quarantine requirements in place because of COVID.

“It was in a way quite good because it eased me into reality, rather than throwing me straight into the big world after being in such a sheltered existence for so long,” Kylie says thoughtfully.

“I was with my mother. We were in a nice hotel room together. I had internet and TV, but I wasn’t meeting everyone I’d ever met in my life and talking to everyone. That would have been quite overwhelming. So, in retrospect, it was actually a blessing in disguise to have this drip-feed approach to reality, being back in Australia again.”

Kylie smiles. We’re in the living area in the home she shares with her partner, journalist and comedian Sami Shah, in Melbourne. Bookshelves run the length of one wall. There are plants everywhere. Kylie says the thing she missed most in prison was nature.