Sayed Kashua

Sayed Kashua, a writer, journalist and screenwriter, was born in the Israeli Arab town of Tira in 1975. Between 1990-1993, he studied at the High School for Sciences and Arts in Jerusalem, and later philosophy and sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 1996, he has written for the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha’Ir and the daily Haaretz on culture and television; he has also written Arab Labor, a satiric sitcom, for Israel TV. At present, he writes a satirical column in Haaretz and teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, having moved to the USA in 2014.

Kashua has been awarded the Grinzane Cavour Award for Debut Novel (Italy, 2004), the Prime Minister’s Prize (2005), the Lessing Prize for Critics (Germany, 2006), the Bernstein Prize (2011) and the Prix des Lecteurs du Var for Second Person Singular (France, 2012).

Photo by: Dan Porges