In a ceremony held at the Diplomatic Academy of Russia Ahmad Dehghan’s novel, Journey to Heading 270 Degrees, was awarded by the jury of Teraincagnita literary award on Thursday. Iran's Cultural Attaché to Russia, Reza Maleki, received the prize on behalf of the Iranian novelist.
The novel was translated into Russian by Alexander Andryushkin and Sadra Publications released the work in Russia in last month. Previously, the book was translated into English by Paul Sprachman and Los Angeles based Mazda Pub set it out in 2006.
The work tells the story of a young student who leaves high school to fight voluntarily in a war of 1980s waged upon Iranians by Saddam Hussein and his western supporters. The hero of the novel, Naser, is somehow alienated and is not a true believer in war and its heinous scenes of misery and destruction. After witnessing horrible course of the war, in which he loses some of his comrades, he gets on a bus and goes back home.
A paragraph of the work reads: “I flip the pages again and begin at the beginning. My nose was filled with fumes from burnt powder. The words stoop before me and pass quickly through the gap between two piles of earth. Hoseyn crawls face first into the foxhole. I grab his arm and jerk him aside so we won’t be in the line of fire. There is a gash from his earlobe to the tip of his chin. His left eyelid flutters. Blood and mud seep from the wound along his jaw.”
Holding Masters in Anthropology, Ahmad Dehghan was born in then-a-suburban-city of Karaj in 1966 and rushed to war fronts after finishing high school. His acclaimed novel, Journey to Heading 270 Degrees, was published in Farsi in 1996 and soon found its place among fiction lovers in Iran and across the globe.
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