Books saved my life in solitary (Booker Prize)

Anita Singh, Telegraph, 11/27/23; Dhr. Seven, Ash Wells, Pat Mac (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Reading The Handmaid's Tale and cutting up our prison orange as the new black in Iran...

'Books could take me to another world'

If I could read just ONE book...

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has revealed that she was saved from despair during captivity in Iran by reading a banned copy of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Booker Prize

She said that she and other cellmates maintained a secret library in Iranian prison. She was speaking at the ceremony for the 2023 Booker Prize, which was awarded to Paul Lynch for Prophet Song.

Prophet Song is set in a totalitarian Ireland, where the government has embraced tyranny and families live in fear of the secret police.

Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested by Iranian authorities in 2016 on spying charges and spent almost six years in detention. She told the audience:

84,000 Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts found

“I spent nine months in solitary confinement with very little access to anything. Being claustrophobic, solitary was a horrific experience.

“After five months my family could bring me books. When the guard opened the door and handed over the books to me, I felt liberated; I could read books, they could take me to another world, and that could transform my life.”

Others left their books for us

In 2023 in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, 84 thousand unread manuscripts were discovered.

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The books included War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope, and The Return by Hisham Matar.

But it was Margaret Atwood’s novel, belonging to a cellmate, which had the most profound effect.

“One day a cellmate received a book through the post [mail]; it was The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, translated into Farsi [Iranian language].

Who thought a book banned in Iran could find its way to prison through the mail? 

“When we left, we all bequeathed books to the secret library in the ward to keep our stories alive for others to come, just like others left their books for us to survive,” she said.

Ms. Zagahari-Ratcliffe previously revealed that she watched Andy Murray’s 2016 Wimbledon victory while in solitary confinement....

‘Stunning’ use of language

Paul Lynch was one of four Irish authors longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, which he attributed to the island country’s proud literary history.

“Writers like Beckett or [James] Joyce don’t just produce great works of literature, they transmit into the culture a massive energy and we’re still drawing on that, whether we realize it or not,” he said. More

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