Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was held in an Iranian political prison for almost six years after being detained in April 2016, has spoken publicly about the role that sewing played in preserving both her sense of self and her connections with those imprisoned alongside her. Addressing an audience at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye on Thursday, she described how obtaining permission to receive fabrics from outside the prison walls came to represent far more than a practical activity — it became, in her telling, a means of holding onto identity in conditions designed to strip it away.

The fabrics in question were sourced from Liberty London, the celebrated department store whose name carries obvious resonance for someone held without freedom. Zaghari-Ratcliffe acknowledged the irony openly, noting that a place where there was no liberty had nonetheless become somewhere she could possess, however tenuously, something that bore that name. Her husband Richard is said to have gone to considerable lengths to have the materials delivered to her, having first secured written authorisation from prison authorities, who would not ordinarily permit fabric to be brought in.

Once she had access to the materials, she began distributing them among fellow inmates, a gesture that appears to have carried significant emotional weight. She observed that even within an environment of extreme deprivation, people continued to seek ways to express themselves and maintain their dignity. A single ageing industrial sewing machine was available to prisoners, and Zaghari-Ratcliffe was assigned responsibility for it — a position that placed her at the centre of what might be understood as a quiet, collective act of creative survival.

Perhaps the most affecting detail she shared concerned the matching dresses she made for herself and her daughter Gabriella, who had been only twenty-two months old at the time of her mother's arrest. She had long dreamed of sewing such dresses, and she eventually did so — sending them out so that Gabriella could wear hers when she visited the prison. It is a detail that sits uneasily alongside the diplomatic circumstances of her detention, during which she is widely regarded to have been used as leverage in a long-running financial dispute between Iran and the United Kingdom.