Gail Hareven is the author of seventeen books, including novels, short story collections, and children's books. She is the author of The Confessions of Noa Weber, a novel which won the 2001 Sapir Prize in Israel and the 2010 Best Translated Book Award in the United States. Her translated stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Asymptote, Lilith, and Two Lines, and are featured in both volumes of Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature. Her second novel in English, Lies: First Person (2015), was published to critical acclaim. Her writing has been translated into seven languages.

Hareven was a regular columnist for Hadashot, Maariv, and The Jerusalem Report, and continues to write book reviews and essays for Israeli magazines and literary journals. She has written two award-winning plays for children and, together with Dr. Avi Hassner, has translated Shakespeare's Sonnets into Hebrew (Dvir Publishing 2011). She has taught fiction workshops at the Open University and Tel Aviv University, among others, and was a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at Amherst College. In recent years, she has taught fiction writing at the The Ma'aleh School of Television, Film and the Arts, and at the Israel National Library's Pardes Program. She is a third-generation member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language and won the 2013 Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Writers.

She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and is the mother of two daughters.

 

 

 

 

Yaniv Iczkovits, born in 1975, is an award-winning author and screenwriter. He has published four novels and one novella, and is now working on developing TV content based on his novels for Keshet and KI, Yes, Endemol Shine and more. His books include Pulse (Hakibbutz HaMeuchad), which won Haaretz’s debut novel prize and was translated into Italian; Adam and Sophie (HaSifriya HaHadasha), which won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Writers; and Laws of Succession, a novella published in the anthology “There’s a Story Behind the Money” (Achuzat Bayit). His third novel, The Slaughterman’s Daughter, was published by Keter in August 2015 and was awarded the Agnon Prize (2016). Iczkovits won the Ramat Gan Prize (2017) for literary excellence and the People of the Book Foundation Prize (2017). He was shortlisted for the Sapir Prize, and has now been nominated for the British Wingate Literary Prize (2021). The Economist and The Sunday Times selected The Slaughterman’s Daughter as one of the best books published in Britain in 2020, and The New York Times and Kirkus selected the book as one of the top books to look forward to in 2021 in the U.S. In August 2020, Iczkovits published his recent book, Nobody Leaves Palo Alto (Keter) which immediately became a number one best seller in Israel and won critical acclaim.

Iczkovits studied at the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University, and during his Master's degree he spent a year as a Chevening scholar at the University of Oxford. His doctoral dissertation dealt with Ludwig Wittgenstein's thought and analyzed the interplay between ethics and language. He taught for eight years at Tel Aviv University, and after receiving his Ph.D., he went on to pursue postdoctoral research at Columbia University in New York, where he adapted his doctoral dissertation into the book Wittgenstein's Ethical Thought (Palgrave Macmillan 2012).

He currently lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and three daughters.

 

Featured fellow: Yaniv Iczkovits >

 

 

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:

22 February, מחלוני וגם מחלונך: סדנת שירה בהנחיית המשוררת אגי משעול

23-25 June, כי המוח הוא חתיכת רעל: תערוכה משותפת למשוררת אגי משעול ולאמן הרישום יואב ויינפלד

30 July, שיח גלריה: כי המוח הוא חתיכת רעל

 

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. To watch the lecture on IIAS youtube channel click  here.