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Iranian author wins Writing Forge award

06 November 2010 20:24 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Iranian writer Habib Ahmadzadeh has received the third prize of the Writing Forge Short Story Competition for his Letter to the Sa’ad Family, APA reports quoting presstv.ir website.

The story has been translated into English by Paul Sprachman and published in Ahmadzadeh’s award-winning short story collection City under Siege.

Letter to the Sa’ad Family is a letter from the forces under control of the Third Army of Basra to the family of Sa’ad Abd al-Jabbar, a member of the 23rd Battalion of the Special Republican Guard Forces of Iraq.

The writer has asked the â€œfirst finder or finders of this letterâ€ to â€œdeliver its contents in any way possible toâ€ Sa’ad’s family.

Writers from all continents, except Antarctica, took part in the first Writing Forge Short Story Competition. The event’s first and second prizes went to Douglas Bruton and Andrew Scott for The Piano Tuner and I Peel the Clouds Away respectively.

An accomplished writer and scenarist, Habib Ahmadzadeh is a veteran of the Iraq-Iran war, who served as an Iranian navy captain.

His award-winning collection of short stories City under Siege became the basis for Iranian filmmaker Kioumars Pourahmad’s successful Night Bus.

Ahmadzadeh sent his novel Eagle Feather to international peace groups in 2009 to remind the world of the war in Gaza. The novel recounts the siege story of the city of Abadan in southern Iran during the 1980-88 Iraqi-imposed war on Iran and civilian resistance.

His other Iraq-Iran war novel Chess with the Doomsday Machine has also been translated by American scholar Paul Sprachman.