Etgar Keret

Born in Ramat Gan in 1967, Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and film. His books have been published in over four dozen languages and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope, among others. Keret teaches creative writing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Over a hundred short films and several feature films have been based on his stories. He has received the Book Publishers Association of Israel’s Platinum Prize several times, and the Newman Prize for Literature (2012).

In 2010, Keret was honored in France with the decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2007, Keret and Shira Geffen won the Cannes Film Festival’s “Caméra d’Or” award for their movie Jellyfish, and Best Director Award from the French Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers. The two also co-wrote and directed The Middleman (2019), a French mini-series for ARTE, which won the best screenplay award at Festival de la Fiction in La Rochelle. Keret was awarded the 2016 Charles Bronfman Prize. His latest collection, Fly Already, won Israel’s most prestigious literary award, the Sapir Prize (2018) and a National Jewish Book Award (2019). Since 2021, he has been publishing the weekly newsletter “Alphabet Soup” on Substack. In 2022, Keret presented an exhibition about his mother at the Jewish Museum Berlin. His newest short-story collection, Autocorrect, will be published in English in 2025.

Keret’s books have been published abroad in 49 languages.

Photo by: Yanai Yechiel