After serving time in Paris, Rome and Brussels, the Malian star is ready to perform again – and planning a book and a stage show about her fellow inmates and her own prison experiences

‘It’s been like a kind of military training,” says Rokia Traoré of the nine months she has just spent in European prisons. “It was very hard. I was in a bad psychological state because I was separated from my children, but at the same time it was a kind of privilege because I was learning things it’s not possible to learn without being in that situation. Everything is much more intense. Sharing a small space with someone – in a week you know more about them than their mother. You know everything: when she is happy, when she cries, when she goes to the toilet, when she has a shower. You see everything.”

Born and based in Mali, she is one of the most inventive and adventurous female artists in Africa; a singer who can switch from delicate acoustic styles to rock, powered by her bluesy electric guitar work. As well as putting out six studio albums she has toured the UK with the Africa Express project, collaborating with Damon Albarn, Paul McCartney and John Paul Jones. She has been an actor, performing, singing and writing the songs for Desdemona, a 2011 Toni Morrison-penned stage project in which Shakespeare’s tragic heroine was given an African perspective. She has won awards including the French equivalent of a Grammy, and in 2015 she was appointed a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.