Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today had her life turned upside down because her intellectual curiosity took her to a country predisposed to view Westerners asking questions with deep suspicion.

In 2018, Kylie Moore Gilbert, an academic researching the Shia community in Bahrain

and its links to Iran, decided to attend an academic conference in Iran. She made some contacts

and arranged some meetings, but after three weeks and a growing sense that all was not well,

she was eager to board her flight home

when she was arrested at the airport. And so began a nightmare experience that lasted for more

than two years. She was accused of espionage, held in solitary confinement in the notorious

Yvine prison, and eventually sentenced to 10 years for spying.

Contact with her family and the Australian embassy was strictly limited.

The Australian government advised against publicising her case in favour of quiet diplomacy.

The result? A physically and mentally punishing ordeal which only came to an end when Australia and Iran, in effect, arranged a de facto prisoner swap involving a third country, Thailand.

Ms. Moore Gilbert's experience has similarities with those of other Westerners held in Iran, including the British Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe.

Now, Kylie Moore Gilbert has written a book about her experience. Is it possible to heal after such a

shattering ordeal? Well, she joins me on the line now from Melbourne, Australia.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thanks so much for having me.

It's a real pleasure to have you on the show. It is pretty much a year and a half now since you were released from imprisonment in Iran.

How much distance do you now feel from that whole experience?

It feels sometimes like it never happened.

It feels like it was a very lengthy, especially vivid nightmare that I just dreamt one night

when I was asleep and have woken up the next day and I still have

...