In September 2022, Soudabeh, an Iranian student studying in Manchester, was frantically searching for an update on the health of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in hospital in Tehran after being detained by police for allegedly breaking the country’s strict dress code.
The news of Amini’s death, the nationwide protests that followed and the plight of women in her home country kept Soudabeh – who asked to be identified by her first name only – awake at night. “That’s the moment I realised we had to do more to tell the people of the world what’s happening inside Iran,” she says.
