Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has effectively banned a female writer's award-winning bestseller, I Will Turn Out the Lights. The novel, by Zoya Pirzad, has already received four prestigious literary awards in Iran and sold more than 200,000 copies since 2001. It tells the story of a bored Armenian housewife who falls in love with a melancholic widower in the early 1960s. According to the Iranian reformist daily Kargozaran, the book's publisher, Alireza Ramezani, said, "We have not been informed of the reasons for the ban." The culture minister, an appointee of the country's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has refused to renew the publication permit for the book.