TEHRAN – The organizers of the 13th edition of the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Awards, Iran’s most lucrative literary prize, announced on Tuesday that so far it has received 1879 titles of books.

The books will be categorized into four sections, novels, documents, literary critics and short stories. 

Ebrahim Mohammad Hassanbeigi, Hamid Hessam, Mohammadreza Sharafi-Khabushan, Mostafa Jamshidi, Ali Changizi, Abolfazl Horri, Morteza Sarhangi, Maryam Moshref and Mohammadreza Bayrami are the members of the selecting committee for the prize. 

Ebrahim Mohammad Hassanbeigi will also be collaborating as the academic secretary. 

This year, books written on the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, which is known as the Sacred Defense in Iran, will be reviewed to honor the top works of the past four decades.

“Novels, short stories, reviews and documents produced over the past 40 years on the Sacred Defense will be selected by a number of journalists and representatives of the media active in the literature arena,” director of the awards Behruz Jalali has said. 

Winners will be selected by a jury panel and a group of veteran journalists in the program entitled “Forty Years of the Sacred Defense Fiction”.

This program has been designed to highlight the high position of the Sacred Defense in the history of Iranian contemporary literature. 

“Teahouse Painting”, the memoirs of Kazem Darabi, an Iranian suspect in the 1992 Mykonos Restaurant assassinations case in Berlin, won the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Award during the 12th edition last year.

Published in early 2019, “Teahouse Painting” received the honor in the documentation category.

In the book, Darabi explains how he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1997 for having a hand in gunning down four members of the Kurdish opposition in the Mykonos Restaurant in the German capital in 1992 and his life during 15 years in captivity in Germany.

Photo: A poster for the 13th edition of the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Awards.

RM/MMS/YAW