The Development of Fiction in Ilam

Fiction which mostly refers to short/long stories and novels in the modern sense, does not have a long history in Ilam. The beginning of fiction in Ilam goes back to scattered works and short stories by Kalantar Mohammadi. After Mohammadi, Khodadad Ebrahimi introduced himself to the field by publishing his short stories. Ebrahimi published his book “Emotion in the Dust” as the first fiction book published in Ilam in 1378. After this book, other fiction books were published in the form of short story and novel in both Persian and Kurdish. By using a descriptive-analytic method, this study first tries to classify Ilam fiction literature based on the publication time sequence (the edition decade) and then present a brief analysis of the theme of the works and relate the strengths and weaknesses of these works. The results indicate that most of the works have been published in the eighties. It is worth mentioning that the quality of fiction in Ilam has a long way ahead to achieve a desired position. In terms of content, there is not much diversity in these works and themes of war have overshadowed other issues in these works. Publishing stories in the native language (Kurdish) is another concern which has been neglected by the authors. Among the problems facing fiction in Ilam, we can refer to the lack of effort in rewriting oral stories, high costs of printing and improper distribution of published works.