TEHRAN -- No books were deemed worthy of Iran’s most lucrative literary award during this year’s edition of the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Awards.

Each winner of the award receives 110 Bahar Azadi gold coins (worth over $33,000), but no winners were selected at the 2010 ceremony, which was held at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall on Sunday night.
The entries were judged in the five categories of short story, novel, literary criticism, documentation, and historiography, and afterwards, the best writer in each section was honored.
“A sufficient number of works were not submitted, so we cannot select any one of them as the winner of the award,” the secretary of the event, Majid Hamidzadeh, mentioned at the ceremony.
However, he claimed that there is a 60% increase in the quantity of work submitted in comparison with last year.
In the previous edition, the award in the documentation section went to the best-selling war narrative “Da” by Seyyedeh Azam Hosseini. “Language of Mysticism” by Alireza Fuladi, and “Theater of Myths” by Naghmeh Samini shared the literary critics’ award.
The first edition of the award had no winner, either.
“From Implication to Meaning” by Mehdi Mohabbati and “Iran’s History and the Realm of Persian Language” by Seyyed Mehdi Zarqani shared honorary mention of the event in the literary criticism section.
The novels “Paytakht Hall” by Mohammad-Ali Gudni and “Namira” by Sadeq Karamyar received honorary mention in this section as well.
Photo: The photo shows a poster of the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Awards at the presentation ceremony at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall on November 28, 2010. (Fars/Hossein Musavi-Faraz)