9th Edition of the Abolhasan Najafi Award and Medal to Be Held

The closing ceremony of the ninth edition of the Abolhasan Najafi Award and Medal will be held in memory of and in tribute to the scholarly and cultural legacy of the late Abolhasan Najafi, a distinguished translator, linguist, literary scholar and critic whose precision in language and sensitivity to the nuances of texts were among the defining characteristics of his work. He made a lasting contribution to the advancement of literary translation in Persian.

The award continues the path with which Najafi's name has become inseparably associated: recognising language as the foundation of literature and translation, while emphasising accuracy, sound judgement and literary merit in translating valuable works of world literature into Persian.

The ceremony will be attended by a number of translators, researchers, and figures from the cultural and literary community and will be chaired by Ali-Asghar Mohammadkhani. Mehdi Firouzian, Hossein Masoumi Hamedani, Omid Tabibzadeh, Narges Qandilzadeh, Mohammad-Reza Tork-Tatari, Farzaneh Doosti and Abtin Golkar will deliver speeches at the event.

The ceremony will also commemorate the first anniversary of the death of the late Musa Esvar, a distinguished translator of Arabic literature, permanent member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, and longtime associate of Book City. Esvar, who served for many years as one of the judges of the award and played a prominent and influential role in it, made a lasting contribution to culture and literature through his precision and dedication to language and translation.

The ceremony will be held on Saturday, 31 Mordad 1405 (22 August 2026), at 5:00 p.m. at the Book City Central branch.

Abolhasan Najafi (1 October 1927 – 22 January 2016) was a prominent Iranian linguist and translator and a permanent member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. His principal scholarly and literary activities focused on the translation of literary texts, editing, linguistics and the metre of Persian poetry. Among his best-known works are A Dictionary of Colloquial Persian, Ghalat Nanevisim (Let Us Not Write Incorrectly), and his Persian translation of the Thibault Family series.