Fajr Intl. Poetry Festival announces 2013 winners

The seventh edition of Fajr International Poetry Festival has announced this year’s winners during an award ceremony held in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Hosseini along with a number of Iranian and foreign poets and literary scholars attended the ceremony held in Tehran’s Vahdat Hall on February 25, 2013.

This year’s festival honored 19 winners participated in six different categories of the event.

Mehrdad Ahmadi picked up the first award of ‘Modern Poetry’ section, while Elahe Tajikzadeh and Mohammad Mehdi Sayyar received the second and third prize of the section.

The second award of the ‘Classic Poetry’ section went to Sajedeh Jabbarpour and the other participant Hamed Ebrahimpour took the third prize of the category. The section did not have the first winner.

Ahmad Amir khalili and Hamed Askari were also named as the second and the third winners of the ‘Songs’ section while nobody was named as the category’s first winner.

The festival garnered a number of other winners participated in the ‘Children and Young Adult’, ‘The Prophet of Islam’ and ‘Research and Criticism’ sections.

Abbas Moshfeq Kashani, Mohammad Ali Mojahedi and Morteza Amiri served at the jury panel of the newly assigned category of ‘The Prophet of Islam’.

Mehdi Mohaqeq, Mir Jalal al-Din Kazazi and Hossein Razmjou also attended the festival as the jury members of the ‘Criticism and Research’ section.

Mohammad Ja’afar Yahaqi, Mohammad Reza Turki, Baha al-Din Khorramshahi, Khosro Ehteshami, Mohammad Kazem Kazemi, Naser Keshavarz, Mostafa Rahmandoust and Erfan Nazar Ahari were among the other jurors.

Over 2000 poets from Iran and 15 other countries took part in this year’s literary event that kicked off in the Iranian southern island of Kharg located in the Persian Gulf on February 5.

The festival was also held in the other Iranian cities of Tehran, Gorgan, Qazvin, Kerman, Hamedan, Ardebil, Mashhad and Shiraz.

Iran holds the international Fajr poetry, film, theater, visual arts and music festivals every year to mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.