Richard Ratcliffe’s long years of waiting for sunlight – and Nazanin

Donna Ferguson recalls nine interviews since 2017 that charted dashed dreams and suffering mingled with hope

When I first met Richard Ratcliffe, back in 2017, his wife Nazanin had just been told that she could face an additional 16 years in an Iranian prison.

He had, by then, been separated from his three-year-old daughter Gabriella for half her life: she was captured as an 18-month-old baby along with her mother, and would spend the next three years in Iran, living with her grandparents.