Nobel laureate’s smuggled memoir details beatings and neglect in Iranian prisons

In an exclusive extract of writing smuggled from prison in Iran, the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has described the “torture” of solitary confinement, and her systematic medical neglect by the prison system.

The writing from the past decade will be part of a soon to be published memoir that gives a rare and alarming insight into the treatment of Mohammadi, who is in critical condition. It details beatings, constant interrogations, deprivation of medical care and long stretches in solitary confinement during her numerous imprisonments.

“There is no hardship worse than illness combined with imprisonment,” she wrote. “Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner’s rope. Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail.”

After those words were written and she was rearrested, Mohammadi’s health hit another crisis point this year, with her weight dropping by more than 20kg. She was found unconscious in her cell after an apparent heart attack in March. Requests by her family and doctors for her to receive proper medical treatment from her team of surgeons in Tehran were repeatedly denied. She is now being held at a small regional hospital in Zanjan, in a critical condition.

Her family have said her ongoing detention and the refusal of proper medical care constitute a “slow execution”.

Mohammadi wrote of how her stretches in prison have caused significant damage to her health. She has suffered a pulmonary embolism, seizures, multiple infections, chest pain and other life-threatening medical events in prison, and describes the agonising wait for often inadequate medical care.

The writings were smuggled out by fellow prisoners and visitors during Mohammadi’s time in Iran’s notorious Evin, Qarchak and Zanjan prisons, at considerable risk to their own safety. They had to be rewritten several times over the past decade, after pages or notebooks were discovered and destroyed by prison guards.

The memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, will be published in September. It covers Mohammadi’s early life, the way her parents helped inspire her political convictions, her path into activism, and the many years she spent in prison for public protest.

Mohammadi has been arrested 14 times for her activism on advancing women’s rights in Iran, improving the conditions of prisoners and ending the regime’s use of the death penalty.

She has been sentenced to a total of 44 years in prison and 154 lashes across a number of convictions. The campaigner was awarded the Nobel peace prize while in prison in 2023, during the Women, Life, Freedom protests.

In December 2024, she was released on a temporary sentence suspension after a series of health events, but was violently rearrested a year later and sentenced to years’ more prison time in February this year.