Born in Jerusalem in 1954, David Grossman is one of Israel’s leading writers. He has been wrestling with the trauma of war and the prospects for peace, as well as love, jealousy, and family relationships for more than three decades. In his first novel, See Under: Love, he grappled with the legacy of the Holocaust. In The Yellow Wind, he foresaw the explosive first intifada, and in his bestselling To the End of the Land, he hauntingly portrayed a mother’s love for her son in a time of conflict.
He is the author of seventeen books that have been translated into forty-five languages around the world. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, and several of his books have been adapted to international stage and screen productions.
Winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize and the 2018 Israel Prize.
Sarit Yishai-Levi, a journalist and author, was born in Jerusalem in 1947 to a Sephardic family that has lived in the city for seven generations. She studied at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio and later at Tel Aviv University. Before turning to journalism, Yishai-Levi acted in theater and film for several years. Later, she was a correspondent for various Israeli newspapers and magazines, including At, Monitin, HaOlam HaZeh and Hadashot; she also hosted Hebrew TV and radio programs in Los Angeles. At present, she is a senior correspondent for Olam Ha’Isha magazine and hosts TV shows on tourism and lifestyle. Yishai-Levi has published four non-fiction books. Her first novel, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, a bestseller in Israel, received the Publishers Association’s Gold, Platinum and Diamond Prizes for selling more than 100,000 books. She also received the Steimatzky Prize for best-selling book of the year (2014).
Her second novel A Woman beyond the Sea was also a bestseller and received the Publishers Association’s Gold and Platinum Prizes.
The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem was also adapted into a TV series, which was sold to Netflix.
Yishai Sarid is the acclaimed author of the novels Limassol and The Memory Monster, which was listed in The New York Times’ 100 notable books of 2020. Son of late Yossi Sarid, who was a prominent Israeli politician, Sarid has obtained a Law Degree at Hebrew University, and worked in the Ministry of Justice as a prosecutor.
The Memory Monster is a fictional report, written by a young historian to the chairman of “Yad Vashem”. The narrator becomes obsessed with the accounts from the war, and finds himself trapped in the chairman’s memories of the holocaust. The New York Times book review called it “a brilliant novel”, and Kirkus Review hailed it as a “powerful novel, rendered beautifully into English”. Sarid’s earlier novel, Limassol, tells the story of a secret service agent, getting involved in a plot with an ailing Palestinian poet from Gaza, his terrorist exiled son, and an Israeli female peace activist.
Sarid has won the Grand Prix de literature policiere in France, and was shortlisted for the Irish IMPAC prize. His novels were translated to French, German, English, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Catalan. Sarid lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and three children. His other novels, The Third and Victorious, have have been published in Israel and have yet to be translated into English.
