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Aharon Appelfeld

אהרן אפלפלד

Leading author Aharon Appelfeld was born near Czernowitz, Romania, in 1932. When he was eight, his mother was killed, and he and his father were sent to a concentration camp. He escaped and spent three years in hiding, moving from village to village, before joining the Russian army as a cook. He reached pre-state Israel in 1946. Appelfeld is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University. He has been visiting professor at Boston, Brandeis and Yale Universities, and visiting scholar at Oxford and Harvard.

Appelfeld’s fiction on the Holocaust has received worldwide acclaim, and has been published in over 25  languages. Among his many awards: the Prime Minister’s Prize (1969), the Brenner Prize (1975), the Bialik Prize (1979), the National Jewish Book Award (USA, 1979), the Israel Prize (1983), the prestigious Prix Medicis Etranger (France, 2004), the Nelly Sachs Prize (Germany, 2005), the Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy, 2008) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (UK, 2012). He was also decorated as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France, 2016).  

Photo by: Dan Porges

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