Itamar Yaoz-Kest

Itamar Yaoz-Kest was born in Hungary in 1934. He was interned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944 and came to Israel in 1951. Yaoz-Kest studied literature, Bible and Hebrew language at Tel Aviv University and has served as the editor of Eked Publishing House for many years. He has published many books of poetry and a prose trilogy. He is also a translator from Hungarian and classical Latin into Hebrew.

Yaoz-Kest has received many literary prizes, including the Talpir Prize (1967), the Herzl Award (1972), the Wertheim Prize for Poetry (1984), the Kugel Prize (1984), the Lea Goldberg Prize (1990), the Prime Minister’s Prize twice (1992; 2007), the Ministry of Education and Culture Award for Translation (1998), the Israel Efrat Prize (1999), the President’s Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2002), the ACUM Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2004) and the Brenner Prize (2016). In 1992 he was honored by the Hungarian Government for his translations of Hungarian poetry.

Photo by: Dan Porges