Crumble, cookies and madeleines – recipes of hope for Iran's jailed women

Sepideh Gholian's diary of prison life came out four years ago. Next month, she will publish a cookbook to honour her fellow inmates. Rachel Cooke meets the journalist who brought her work to the west

- Rachel Cooke

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.

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."