The Evin Prison Bakers' Club
From Women's Fightback 34: Will Roberts reviews 'The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes', by Sepideh Gholian.
Sepideh Gholian released from prison
On Wednesday 11 June 2025, Sepideh Gholian was released from Evin Prison in Tehran. In total, she served almost seven years.
This moment will stand as an emblem of empathy for and between the women who have been violated. Together, with faces burned by acid and bodies bruised by the lashes of belts, they’ll swarm out and over the wall to run, hold one another’s hands and sing: ‘Feminism taught me this.’
She may be a totemic figure for the Iranian opposition, an agitator amongst striking workers in a key industry in Iran, and one of the bravest individuals in a generation of brave Iranian activists. But it is a little unfair for the rest of us to discover that Sepideh Gholian is also a brilliant writer.
Her new book has been smuggled part-by-part from Evin Prison in Tehran, where she was held prisoner for seven years. She was released on 11 June 2025.
SEPIDEH GHOLIAN
Gholian is no stranger to prison. She was first arrested in 2018, one of more than a dozen activists, trade unionists and organisers connected to the Haft Tappeh Sugar Factory strike. She was given a month-long sentence, then had another month of freedom before being arrested again, this time after a state television channel aired a video of her confessing to being a “communist” insurgent trying to overthrow the government with Western backing. She insisted that investigators had beaten her, and that she’d been made to record a false confession.
In July 2020, she was sentenced to five years in prison for “propaganda” and “disturbing the public mind”. The social and industrial ferment that Gholian had been part of back in 2018 was now reaching a feverish peak. The murder of Jina Amini in September 2022 sparked a wave of protest unlike anything Iran had seen so far in the 21st century. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement had begun, and Gholian was a fervent supporter.
She was released partway through her sentence on medical grounds in March 2023. Not wanting to waste time, she immediately recorded a video of a ‘solo protest’ before going home. Hair uncovered and holding a bunch of flowers, she called for the downfall of the Iranian regime, and cried, “Khamenei, you tyrant, we’re going to put you in a grave!”. She was rearrested before the day was out.
Gholian turned 30 while serving her third prison sentence for political activism.
PRISON DIARY
Gholian’s first book of prison memoirs, 'Tilapia Sucks the Blood of Hur al-Azim', was published online by IranWire in 2020. It is a ‘traditional’ set of prison diaries, documenting the horrific experiences that she and her fellow inmates endured. Many prisoners’ whereabouts and cases are only known about beyond the prison walls because Gholian has written about them.
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a genuinely original attempt to do something different with the ‘prison diary’ form. Rather than stick to the details of prison life (though there is no shortage of detail in here), Gholian has constructed a prison recipe book. Each chapter is devoted to a different woman who, like the author, has been forced into the repetitive cruelty of life in Iranian prison. These are then punctuated with a dessert recipe that Gholian has picked out, either to match the woman’s personality or to lift her spirits. The result is a slightly bewildering reading experience at first, but proves engaging and touching in a way that feels truly new.
MODERN IRANIAN REPRESSION
The book has no end of stories that detail the absurd cruelty of the Iranian regime, and the theocratic, patriarchal society that it oversees. A pregnant young woman is terrified of anyone finding out about her foetus, because if word gets out, her father will kill her mother and her brother will kill her sister. Under Islamic penal law, a murder victim’s next of kin is entitled to retribution, but can also pardon the murderer, meaning father and brother would be free to get one another off the hook. The same woman is terrified of morning sickness while in her cell, because “the sound of vomiting is forbidden”. We learn many of the prisoners’ real names. Some are familiar, like dual British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who met Gholian in prison before being released in March 2022. Some are less well known, but deserve more attention. Take Elham Barmaki, who was imprisoned on charges of espionage and served fourteen months in solitary confinement (the UN considers any period longer than 15 days “torture”).
Some of the stories detailed in the book are heart-wrenching. A long section detailing an illicit abortion is one of the most enduring memories after reading, and serves as a painfully relevant case study on the importance of fighting for reproductive freedoms. I would be impressed if anyone managed to finish this book without crying. I certainly didn’t.
COOKING
It would be a crime to review a recipe book without talking about the recipes. The very fact of their existence is a feat in itself. In her introduction, Gholian declares that she’s not much of a baker. Given her other talents, it’s hard to believe her. Based on the couple I’ve made so far, the recipes are delicious.
Knowing that each dish was tested in literal prison conditions makes you feel oddly close to the people discussed, who must also have noticed the smell of saffron and rosewater filling the room, or stood waiting for the mixture to cook. It would be easy to read the book and ignore the recipes; I encourage you not to do so. They aren’t just optional extras, they’re part of the story.
You mustn’t boil your saffron when making saffron cookies, because imprisoned academic Zahra Zehtabchi said you mustn’t. You must play folk music from the region of Bushehr when making finger-twist halva, and Iranian rap music when making madeleines for defiant feminist journalist Marzieh Amiri. Gholian wants you to taste what these women taste, and to share it with the people you love. It would be rude not to.
Workers’ Liberty has campaigned in solidarity with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and with Iranian workers and activists more broadly, for many years. We have run a campaign calling for Sepideh Gholian’s release, and we have written extensively on the wave of protests since 2022 that have spread to key industrial sectors like the oil industry, where strikes could topple the already crumbling national economy.
The only way out of the current nightmare is for the Iranian working class to build a serious movement against the clerical regime. Imprisoned for her courageous fight alongside the working-class movement, Sepideh Gholian has created a powerful testament to the ongoing dissident life endured under impossibly hard conditions.
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes, by Sepideh Gholian, trans. Hessam Ashrafi. Oneworld Publications, 2025.
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