Israeli author David Grossman won the Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar.
He will share the £50,000 ($64,000) award with translator Jessica Cohen.
Grossman is the first Israeli writer to win the prize.
The book unfolds over the course of a stand-up show during which comedian Dovelah Gee exposes a wound he has been living with for years and the difficult choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.
Grossman’s works have been translated into more than 30 languages and he was also decorated with France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998.
Awards/Honours of David Grossman:
1984: Prime Minister’s Prize for Creative Work
1985: Bernstein Prize (original Hebrew novel category)
1993: Bernstein Prize (original Hebrew novel category)
2001: Sapir Prize for Someone to Run With
2004: JQ Wingate Prize (fiction) for Someone to Run With
2004: Italian prize Premio Flaiano;
2004: Bialik Prize for literature (with Haya Shenhav and Ephraim Sidon)
2007: Emet Prize
2007: Ischia International Journalism Award
2007: honorary Doctor Honoris Causa by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
2008: Geschwister-Scholl-Preis
2010: Albatros Literaturpreis for To the End of the Land, with German translator Anne Birch Hauer
2010: Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
2011: JQ Wingate Prize for To the End of the Land
2015: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates
2017: Man Booker International Prize
WRITTEN WORKS OF DAVID:
Works translated into English
• Duel
• The Smile of the Lamb
• See Under: Love
• The Book of Intimate Grammar
• The Zigzag Kid
• Be My Knife
• Someone to Run With
• Her Body Knows: two novellas
• To the End of the Land
• Falling Out of Time
• A Horse Walks Into a Bar: A novel.
Nonfiction
• The Yellow Wind
• Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel
• Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo
• Lion’s honey : the myth of Samson
• Writing in the Dark:
Films
• The Smile of the Lamb
• Someone to Run With
• The Book of Intimate Grammar
• The Zigzag Kid
The international edition of Britain’s Man Booker Prize was introduced in 2005 and up to last year was awarded in recognition of a body of work by a living author whose work was written or available in English.
From 2016, the prize has been given for a single work of fiction that has been translated into English and published in Britain.
The prize was won last year by South Korean author Han Kang for The Vegetarian.
