TEHRAN -- A short story by the Iranian author Habib Ahmadzadeh won the third prize at the Writing Forge Short Story Competition in Britain.

The winning story “A Letter to the Sa’d Family” has been translated into English by Paul Sprachman and was published in a story collection under the title of “City under Siege” in the U.S.
“The Piano Tuner” by Douglas Bruton won the first prize and the second prize of the competition went to “I Peel the Clouds Away” by Andrew Stott.
The stories that have “well-crafted writing style, a satisfying and convincing created world and, essentially, a compelling voice” were selected as winners, as is mentioned on the competition’s website.
A new English version of “A City under Siege” was recently released by Sureh-Mehr, a publishing company affiliated with Iran’s Art Bureau in Iran.
A previous version of the book was published by Mazda Publications in the United States in April 2010.
This is the second work by Ahmadzadeh to appear in English translation. The first was the novel “Chess with the Doomsday Machine”.
Ahmadzadeh is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. He has studied theater arts and is an accomplished scenarist.