 "The Evin Prison Bakers' Club: Surviving Iran's Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes")
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes
By Sepideh Gholian
Published by Oneworld Publications
200 pages ₹399
In 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran killed and buried political prisoners in the Khavaran cemetery — nine years after the 1979 revolution that established Ayatollah Khomeini as the Supreme Leader and Iran as a theocratic state. This mass execution gave rise to a resistance group called “Mothers of Khavaran”. It includes mothers and family members of the victims dedicated to seeking truth and justice from the state. In 2022, the death of Jina Mahsa Amini led to the most significant feminist rebellion in Iran with the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom”.
Many lives have been obliterated from Iran, many voices unjustly silenced for speaking up against the Supreme Leader. Innocent individuals are detained and tortured in prison. To remember these lives, the names of the people who have disappeared and are systematically abused, is an act of resistance.
Against this backdrop, Sepideh Gholian, journalist and human rights activist, becomes a chronicler of women’s lives in Iran’s prisons such as Evin, Bushehr, and Ahvaz. She has been imprisoned multiple times starting in 2018 when she “took on the role of reporting on the strike, organising meetings and building solidarity for the strikers in the local community and beyond.” In 2020, IranWire published her first prison diary Tilapia Sucks the Blood of Hur al-Azim, translated from Persian to English by Zahra Moravvej. In 2024, IranWire published her second book, which has now been translated by Hessam Ashrafi and published as The Evin Prison Bakers Club.
In the introduction, journalist and documentary filmmaker Maziar Bahari writes, “For security reasons, I cannot tell you exactly how I received the different chapters of this book from Sepideh. 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.” Ms Gholian had reached out to Mr Bahari to share the idea of this book. She was released in June 2025. The author describes Evin prison as standing “proudly at the edge of Tehran, marring the view of all those who pass by. The locks and chains, and the imposing iron gate, make all the more racket under torrential rain.” She writes in a light-hearted manner with a biting wit. She answers the obvious question: how does one bake in prison? She says, “…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. Even without gas.”
She dedicates the recipes for 16 desserts such as halva, Kachi pudding, scones, lemon meringue pie, etc., to women prisoners, political and otherwise. These women sing protest songs, dance and bake together. The author instructs readers to do the same in her recipes, looking at it as an act of feminism.
The book begins as a prison memoir and quickly goes into a third person narration of a young woman inducing a DIY abortion in prison because she knows that if authorities learn of her “disgrace” it would put her family in danger. In footnotes, one learns of bone-chilling misogynist laws and practices in Iran— whether it is family members absolving each other of honour killing under Islamic Penal Code or prisoners being forced to confess that their new born children are ISIS members. Despite the intimate portrayal of incarcerated women, the book takes a surreal turn, which defies the solemnity of prison memoirs. The translation captures the solidarity of these women despite the editorial footnote stating that some aspects of the Persian text are not fully reflected here.
Such solidarity in the form of activity groups existed in the prisons before Ms Gholian’s time. She describes the enactment of a play Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman in Evin prison on January 5, 2013, led by Nazanin Deyhimi. Ms Gholian contextualises the character of Paulina Salas, the victim of state-sponsored rape and torture in an unnamed South American country who confronts her tormentor, stating, “The Paulinas of Iran know by heart the sounds of the laughter of men who leave bruises on their bodies in the corners of cells. They know the smell of them, even the pace of their footsteps. One day the Paulinas will hunt down the possessors of those voices, although they won’t be able to entrust them to the courts when they do. Until then, the sound of any door opening at midnight will remind them of what was done to them. Resistance isn’t their only weapon. They can also keep reminding the voices: we shall not forget. In so doing, they keep… — the torturers — of Iran afraid, forever.”
In 12 chapters of this genre-defying work, Ms Gholian shows that even under surveillance and silence, small moments of joy can ring louder than prison bells. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a testimony of women who resist erasure and knead resistance into their daily lives, letting it rise despite their confinement.
The reviewer is an independent books and culture writer based in Sambalpur, Odisha. @geekyliterati
