I often ridicule prizes such as the Man Booker, which consider only 100 or 120 books each year (from the entire Commonwealth .... seriously ?), but there might be such a thing as being too open to submissions: IBNA reports that Over 4000 works submitted for 5th Jalal Al-e Ahmad Award (4595, actually).
Okay, only 1551 of those were fiction (the only category that really matters, after all) -- 1071 were literary criticism , 849 'documentaries', etc. -- but it's still a lot to sort through. Disappointingly, they not only don't reveal the 1551 titles considered, they don't even let us know (here, or anywhere I could find, though there's more background information (in Farsi) about the prize here) what the eight books that: "have been shortlisted for the 2nd phase" are.
(Note that the winner receives: "110 Bahar Azadi gold coins" -- which, given the current collapse of the rial, might be one explanation for why everyone submitted something in the hopes of winning .....)
Okay, only 1551 of those were fiction (the only category that really matters, after all) -- 1071 were literary criticism , 849 'documentaries', etc. -- but it's still a lot to sort through. Disappointingly, they not only don't reveal the 1551 titles considered, they don't even let us know (here, or anywhere I could find, though there's more background information (in Farsi) about the prize here) what the eight books that: "have been shortlisted for the 2nd phase" are.
(Note that the winner receives: "110 Bahar Azadi gold coins" -- which, given the current collapse of the rial, might be one explanation for why everyone submitted something in the hopes of winning .....)