Aussie academic kept in Iranian jail for 804 days

Even after being arrested at an airport, stripped of her belongings and interrogated for days, Kylie Moore-Gilbert thought her captors would see she was not a spy.

The Australian academic had been in Iran for her research on the Middle East and Islam, cultures she admired and enjoyed.

Perhaps that was part of the reason she brushed off the hotel receptionist’s warning that ‘‘bad men’’ had been asking about her, and even after her detainment, pass up an opportunity to disappear between interrogations.

But when the Revolutionary Guards put her in prison, with charges but no lawyer, a cell with no bed and prison guards with no English, her confusion developed into fear, anger and eventually a lonely, bored depression.

Moore-Gilbert shares her strange and emotional time in an absorbing level of detail in her true story, The Uncaged Sky.

The small concrete cell, meagre rations, language barriers and repetitive interrogations were upsetting and frustrating. Practical challenges included menstruating in a prison without supplies, and getting only a single square of toilet paper at a time.

Alone for several days at a time, Moore-Gilbert reflected on the days leading up to her arrest, and her growing unease while meeting academics.

She learnt she was to be tried in a court where she was not allowed to submit evidence, nor hear the evidence against her.

Moore-Gilbert also wondered if some of her captors could be trusted, as they seemed to have different bosses, and she analysed their every kind look or secretive advice. She even questioned the loyalty of a new cellmate, having heard the Guard’s tactics included planting informants in cells.

Despite the anxiety, she found comfort in friendship with women in nearby cells, using secret notes to learn about her captors and other inmates. Her book includes photos of notes and cartoons they shared, poking fun at certain guards and messages of strength.

Over time, she learnt to speak Farsi by reading newspapers, befriended female guards with varying ideas about feminism, and realised hunger strikes could get her negotiations with the surprisingly kind prison manager, Mr Hosseini.

That was how she got two of her friends as cellmates, meeting them in person for the first time after months of secret notes in a ‘‘messy three-way embrace, tears pouring down our cheeks’’.

The Uncaged Sky spans more than two years of uncertainty, anxiety, fear and frustration. But the bleak experience is broken up by little moments of pleasure and victory; smuggling meaningful gifts of dried fruit between cells, playing volleyball with old socks, and shouting support across the yard to a dissident journalist shortly before his execution.

Then there’s Moore-Gilbert’s daring escape attempt, climbing onto the roof of the interrogation building. ‘‘Oh my God, I feel so free,’’ she said, feeling the breeze on her hair and the sun on her face, and screamed at the city of Tehran below: ‘‘Azadi, azadi (the Farsi word for freedom)!’’