There is a particular cruelty in the coincidence that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, locked inside an Iranian political prison with no liberty of movement or speech, possessed a small, carefully hoarded stash of cloth from the London store that bears the very word she had been denied. She had bought the Liberty fabrics before her arrest in April 2016 — bright, precious things she considered too special to cut — and for years they sat waiting for an occasion that never arrived. It was only behind bars, she told the audience at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye last Thursday, that her mindset finally shifted, and she understood that the occasion had, in fact, already come. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker who was held by Iranian authorities for nearly six years as what amounted to a diplomatic pawn in tensions between Tehran and London, described the considerable effort required simply to bring fabric into the prison.

The rules did not permit it; she had to obtain special written permission, and her husband Richard was enlisted to navigate the bureaucratic ordeal of sending the cloth to her. What arrived, however, was more than material. She began distributing pieces among the other women incarcerated alongside her, because, as she put it, everyone wanted a fragment of the liberty they did not have. The sewing that followed was neither tidy nor effortless.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe freely admitted she had never been a confident seamstress, her mother having guarded the family sewing machine with such jealousy that the skill was never passed on.