Agi Mishol

Artist in residence 2020-2021

Agi Mishol is one of Israel’s most prominent and popular poets, and the author of 16 volumes of poetry.

Mishol was born in Romania in 1947 to Hungarian-speaking Holocaust survivors. When she was four years old, her family immigrated to Israel and settled in Gedera. After completing her BA and MA degrees in Hebrew Literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mishol launched a literature and creative-writing teaching career, at Ben-Gurion University, Tel Aviv University, and The Hebrew University (where she was Poet-in-Residence in 2007), among other institutions. In 2006, she served as the artistic director of the Jerusalem International Poetry Festival, and since 2011, she has led the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv. She lives in Moshav Kfar Mordechai, where she grows peaches, persimmons, and pomegranates.

The topics of Mishol’s poetic spectrum encompass flora and fauna, varied and colorful landscapes, love and romance, powerful eroticism, and the observation of the human condition. Her writing balances lyric precision and accessibility to the readers, combining everyday language and colloquial expression with inventive linguistics. Infused with irony and humor, her poems are intimate and personal yet extensive in their human insight. Mishol’s work centers on the bond between humans and the environment, the changing seasons and the circles of nature and life, while resonating the anxieties and pains of Jewish history and reflecting on contemporary Israeli society.

Mishol’s poems have been widely translated and published in books and various anthologies around the world. Some of her poems were composed by various Israeli musicians.

Her accolades include the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2019), the Newman Prize for life achievement in literature (2018), the Italian LericiPea Award (2014), and the Israeli Prime Minister and Yehuda Amichai literature prizes (1995 and 2002, respectively). Mishol was awarded three honorary doctorates – from Tel Aviv University (2014), the Weizmann Institute of Science (2016), and Bar-Ilan University (2018).

Events: TBA

Joshua Sobol

Author in residence 2019-2020

Joshua Sobol was born in Israel in 1939. He graduated in philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. A leading Hebrew playwright, Sobol has been artistic director of the Haifa Theater; he has also taught esthetics and directed theater workshops at Tel Aviv University as well as at various colleges. Sobol has written over 60 plays, many of which have been performed in Europe and the USA to great critical acclaim. Soul of a Jew was performed at the Edinburgh, Berlin and Chicago Festivals and has been produced in Germany, Austria, Denmark, France, the USA and Russia.

His play Ghetto won the London Critics' and the Evening Standard awards for Britain's Best Play of the Year in 1989, and has been staged in leading theaters worldwide. Witness was performed at the Heidelberg Theater Festival, 2005, and was produced at the Mark Taper Theater in Los Angeles. His polydrama Alma has been playing for the last 18 years in Austria, Italy, Portugal, USA, Germany and Israel. Sobol's novel Silence was nominated for the Sapir Literary award. In 2013 Sobol was awarded the Golden Medal of the City of Vienna in recognition of his long-standing theatrical innovation on the stages of Austria’s capital, and in 2014 he received the Culture Minister's Zionism Prize for Village.

Events: 

May 27, 2020: Open Lecture on Polydrama. View the full lecture here.