By Syma Sayyah, Tehran
On the anniversary of Sadegh Hedayat's birthday last
month, the Hedayat office in Tehran, in collaboration with the Sokhan website and the Iran Artists' Forum
(Khaneh Honnarmandan Iran), staged the Third Sadegh Hedayat Short Story Award.
The ceremony started with a speech by Mr Jahangir
Hedayat, the nephew of the late Sadegh Hedayat and the head of the Hedayat
Office in Tehran, who introduced the guest speaker, the well known scholar Mr.
Mojanie who gave a talk about the three roles that a writer has in Persian
Literature.
Later we learned that the award committee had
received more than 500 stories, even though only one story could be sent by each
author. The selection was made in
two stages. At the first stage, a short list of twenty stories were
selected from all the ones that the
award committee had received, and this hard task befell on to two well known
literary figures: The well known writer and artist Ms. Nahid Kabiri and Mr.
Houshang Ashourzadeh. Interestingly
70% of the authors were male and they were mostly Iranians; nearly 50% lived and
worked in Tehran; but writers from Afghanistan and Tajikistan were also
represented; and the women sent only 30% of the short
stories.
Next Mr. Hedayat thanked Mr. Solaymaninie of the
website Sokhan for his personal and the site's extensive support for this award
and for the ceremony, as well as the Iran Artists' Forum Managers and staff and
Mr Ramin Jahnbegloo, Mr. Hossein
Ghadimi and Esmaeel Jaaffari. He
then stated that many people have published Hedayat's work without permission,
often abridged and with many mistakes.
The family and the Hedayat Office have many of the original prints and
they hope to be able to offer the public the true and complete set of Hedayat's
work.
Then Mr. Jahangir Hedayat and Ms. Mahin Bahrami-the
winner of first Sadegh Hedayat Award- presented the three finalists best writers
with the award: a book by Farahang Moein, a set of Ahmad Mahmoud books plus a
gold medallion. These winners were:
- Mr Hassan Salmassi with his short story titled Bani
Adam (humans)
- Ms Afsaneh Nouri by her work titled A few
Harmless Short stories
- Ms Homira Ghaderi (from Afghanistan) with If It Rains
Again
The winner of the 3rd Sadegh Hedayat Award who received the award statuette was Mrs. Omir
Tajedine Riyazi for the story Obour va Morour (Traffic).
The ceremony was attended by many well known figurers
in literature, art and social scene
... Payvand News - 3/21/05 ... --
