Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce A B. Yehoshua: Y-HOE-shua (the A is for Abraham, but he is always referred to as A.B.)
One of Israel's preeminent writers, Abraham B. Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem in 1936 and lived in Haifa. He was among the most widely recognized Israeli authors internationally, and best known as a novelist and playwright.
He was the recipient of Israel's top cultural award, the Israel Prize, in 1995, along with dozens of other awards, including the Bialik Prize and the Jewish National Book Award, and his work was translated into 28 languages. He died in June 2022, aged 85.
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A. B. Yehoshua is one of Israel's truly world class writers. Born in Jerusalem
in 1936, Yehoshua published his first short story collection 1962. Since that
time he has published eight novels, as well as plays and non-fictional essays.
Yehoshua's novels engage Israeli and Jewish history in inventive and surprising
ways, and his new novel, A Woman in Jerusalem, set in Israel during the
difficult days of the Second Palestinian Intifada, is no different. In addition
to winning just about every literary prize in Israel, in 2005 Yehoshua was named
a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, putting him in a group that
included five Nobel Prize winners.
Yehoshua recently made headlines here and in Israel after giving a talk at an
American Jewish Committee event in which he questioned the limited natureof a
diasporic Jewish identity, a stance Yehoshua has held for years. This opinion is
neither trivial nor, for us American Jews, something easy to brush aside. But
since Yehoshua earned such a platform for his views on Jewish identity in the
first place thanks to his fiction, in this interview I sought to put his
creative work back at the center.
I translated Yehoshua's answers from the Hebrew. ...
At times, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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