Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Ismail Kadare is an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is a leading international literary figure and intellectual. He focused on poetry until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made him famous internationally.
Ian Russell McEwan is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
The International Booker Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux is a French writer who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory". Her literary work, mostly autobiographical, maintains close links with sociology.
Marcos Aguinis is an Argentine writer. Trained in medical studies, music and psychoanalysis, his work and his thoughts are focused on the notions of independence, democracy and rejection of authoritarianism. He is a proponent of political liberalism, and participates in seminars and conferences from the Freedom Foundation organized by Mario Vargas Llosa. He is the father of business professor, researcher, and author Herman Aguinis.
The Franz Kafka Prize is an international literary award presented in honour of Franz Kafka, the Jewish, Bohemian, German-language novelist. The prize was first awarded in 2001 and is co-sponsored by the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague, Czech Republic.
The Sapir Prize for Literature of Israel is a prestigious annual literary award presented for a work of literature in the Hebrew language. The prize is awarded by Mifal HaPayis, and is a part of the organization's cultural initiatives. It bears the name of the late Pinhas Sapir, a former Finance Minister of Israel, and was first awarded in 2000.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), also known as "the Arabic Booker," is regarded as the most prestigious and important literary prize in the Arab world.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is a Swedish literature prize that is awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, "in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction". Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, the award is based on an author's body of work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize. The academy announces the name of the laureate in early October. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895. Literature is traditionally the final award presented at the Nobel Prize ceremony. On some occasions, the award has been postponed to the following year, most recently in 2018 as of July 2023.
Gonçalo Manuel de Albuquerque Tavares, known professionally as Gonçalo M. Tavares, was born in August, 1970 in Luanda, Angola and is a Portuguese writer and professor of Theory of Science in Lisbon. He published his first work in 2001 and since then has been awarded several prizes. His books have been published in more than 30 countries and the book Jerusalem has been included in the European edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.
Ada E. Yonath is an Israeli chemist and Nobel laureate crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian author and journalist born in Tira, Israel, known for his books and humorous columns in Hebrew and English.
Adania Shibli is a Palestinian author and essayist. She is mainly known for the 2021 translation of her novel Minor Detail into English, German and other languages, and for a public controversy in Germany following the cancellation of a literary prize for this book, originally scheduled for the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair.
The Jerusalem International Book Forum (JIBF), previously known as the Jerusalem International Book Fair, is a business fair and literary festival co-founded by Asher Weill in 1963. It takes place in Jerusalem every second year, and hosts the awarding of the Jerusalem Prize.
