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פרס ספיר
Israel · Since 2000 · For books in Hebrew
Awarded since 2000 by Mifal HaPais, Israel's national lottery, to a work of Hebrew prose fiction published in Israel the year before; a jury chooses a shortlist of five and then the winner. Years follow the prize's own naming (the Sapir Prize for 2003), not the date of the ceremony, which in later years moved to the start of the following year.
Founded by Mifal HaPais chairman Avraham Katz-Oz in memory of the finance minister Pinhas Sapir, the prize was modelled on the British Booker Prize and is the richest literary award in Israel. Publishers submit books, and a jury whose members stay anonymous until the winner is named picks five finalists, later from a longlist of twelve; all five receive a cash award, and the winner also gets support for translations into Arabic and one other language. In its early years the winner was announced during Hebrew Book Week in June. The prize has drawn regular controversy: in 2003 Etgar Keret's book was dropped from the shortlist for falling short of a 60,000-word minimum, later abolished, and the 2009 award was cancelled over a juror's conflict of interest. A separate debut prize has been awarded since 2008.
Showing 34 of 124 books. 90 aren’t in English yet: show all.
Sapir 2021 · Winner
איך לאהוב את בתך · Ekh le-ehov et bitekh
Hila Blum · 52 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A woman from Israel stands on a dark street in a northern Dutch town, looking through a window at the two granddaughters she has never met, the children of her estranged only daughter.
Sapir 2021 · Shortlist
אמונה · Emunah
Dror Mishani · 46 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Crime · Avraham Avraham, book 4
AI-generated summary:A Holon police inspector juggles two cases: a newborn abandoned at a hospital, and a Swiss tourist travelling under false names who has disappeared from a hotel in Bat Yam.
Sapir 2019 · Shortlist
שלוש · Shalosh
Dror Mishani · 43 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Three women find the same man: one, abandoned by her husband for a new family, wants consolation; another wants somewhere to belong and proof that God approves her path; the third wants something else altogether. He keeps the truth from them, and they keep some from him.
Sapir 2018 · Winner
תקלה בקצה הגלקסיה · Takalah bi-ktseh ha-galaksyah
Etgar Keret · 51 when first published
Short stories · 224 pages · Family, Speculative
AI-generated summary:Stories from a world that has lost its bearings, like a galaxy whose sun has gone out: helpless fathers trying to explain a troubling world to their children, ordinary days broken by family disaster, and futures where teenagers are sent to war.
Sapir 2018 · Shortlist
יקיצה · Yekitsah
Nir Baram · 42 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:An Israeli writer wakes in a hotel in a foreign city, his clothes caked with mud, days after the literary festival has ended. He learns he has been telling people that his closest friend, Yoel, is dead, though Yoel is still alive.
Sapir 2017 · Shortlist
שטוקהולם · Shtokholm
Noa Yedlin · 41 when first published
Novel · 384 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:When a world-famous economist and leading Nobel candidate is found dead in bed, the four old friends who discover him hatch a plan to keep his death secret until the prize is announced.
Sapir 2017 · Shortlist
קום קרא · Kum kera
Shimon Adaf · 45 when first published
Novel · 688 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Fourteen years after detective Elish Ben Zaken failed to solve the disappearance of a girl from Sderot in the summer of 2014, the unsolved case still weighs on his niece and nephew in a much-changed Israel.
Sapir 2016 · Winner
המורה · Ha-morah
Michal Ben-Naftali · 52 when first published
Novel · 184 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Thirty years after her stern, solitary English teacher, Elsa Weiss, jumped to her death from the roof of her building, a former pupil sets out to learn who she was and what she had been teaching.
Sapir 2016 · Shortlist
תיקון אחר חצות · Tikun ahar hatsot
Yaniv Iczkovits · 40 when first published
Novel · 432 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In 1894, Fanny Keismann sets off across the Russian Empire after the man who deserted her older sister, resolved to haul him home to his family or, failing that, to get a divorce document out of him.
Sapir 2015 · Winner
הרומאן המצרי · Ha-roman ha-Mitsri
Orly Castel-Bloom · 55 when first published
Novel · 180 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A Jewish family whose Egyptian roots reach back centuries comes to Israel in the 1950s with a group of young leftists, who are taken in by a kibbutz and soon thrown out. Their saga continues through the generations, half history, half invention.
Sapir 2014 · Winner
הבית אשר נחרב · ha-Bayit asher nehrav
Ruby Namdar · 49 when first published
Novel · 528 pages
AI-generated summary:A successful and elegant New York professor of comparative culture, at ease with his career and his tangled love life, is suddenly overwhelmed by mystical visions of the priests' service in the Temple in Jerusalem.
Sapir 2013 · Winner
בעלת הבית · Ba'alat ha-bayit
Noa Yedlin · 38 when first published
Novel · 424 pages · Family, Satire, Crime
AI-generated summary:A jobless, newly separated academic hears on the news that his adored mother, a history professor and deputy head of a peace think tank, is suspected of embezzling millions from the institute.
Sapir 2013 · Shortlist
אפשרות של אלימות · Efsharut shel alimut
Dror Mishani · 38 when first published
Novel · 259 pages · Crime, Family · Avraham Avraham, book 2
AI-generated summary:Back from a holiday, a Holon police inspector takes on the case of a dummy bomb left outside a kindergarten, while an older father raising two sons alone since his Filipina wife vanished prepares to flee.
Sapir 2012 · Shortlist
בזעיר אנפין · Bi-ze'ir anpin
Yirmi Pinkus · 46 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Family, Satire
AI-generated summary:In 1989 a prosperous Tel Aviv shopkeeper and his wife plan their yearly autumn holiday in the Tyrolean Alps, but she insists that her struggling sister come along, and more and more relatives join the scheme.
Sapir 2010 · Winner
תש"ח · Tashah
Yoram Kaniuk · 80 when first published
Novel · 190 pages · War, Historical, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A seventeen-year-old from a good Tel Aviv family joins the Palmach in 1948 and fights on the road to Jerusalem; sixty years later he tries to recall what really happened, unsure his memory can be trusted.
Sapir 2010 · Shortlist
אנשים טובים · Anashim tovim
Nir Baram · 34 when first published
Novel · 421 pages · Historical, War, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1938 an ambitious Berlin adman decides to sell his talents to Hitler's state, while in Leningrad the daughter of a Jewish scholar must collaborate with Soviet power to save her younger brothers.
Sapir 2010 · Shortlist
גוף שני יחיד · Guf sheni yahid
Sayed Kashua · 35 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:The lives of a lawyer from East Jerusalem, a student from Tira, and an Israeli boy from Jerusalem's Beit HaKerem and his mother become entangled in a story of love, betrayal, loyalty and assumed identities.
Sapir 2006 · Winner
אם יש גן עדן · Im yesh Gan Eden
Ron Leshem · 29 when first published
Novel · 360 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Five years after Israel left Lebanon, a former team commander looks back on the army's last year at the Beaufort, an isolated hilltop outpost with its own rules, its own absurdities and its own language.
Sapir 2006 · Shortlist
עדן · Eden
Yael Hedaya · 41 when first published
Novel · 496 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In a moshav in central Israel, five people live through one stormy month: a separated couple who live next door to each other, a couple facing their last attempt at IVF, and a sixteen-year-old girl.
Sapir 2005 · Winner
ילדה · Yaldah
Alona Frankel · 67 when first published
Nonfiction · 280 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A Jewish girl in occupied Poland survives the Second World War by hiding wherever she can be hidden: in a cart of straw, a pigsty, a bunker behind a kitchen stove, a crate that doubles as her bed.
Sapir 2005 · Shortlist
מות הנזיר · Mot ha-nazir
Alon Hilu · 32 when first published
Novel · 307 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Damascus, 1840: a stormy night-time meeting between an Italian monk and the teenage son of a wealthy Jewish merchant family ends in a death, and the city's Jews are accused of killing the monk for his blood.
Sapir 2005 · Shortlist
ארבעה בתים וגעגוע · Arba'ah batim ve-ga'agu'a
Eshkol Nevo · 33 when first published
Novel · 374 pages · Family, Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:Over one Jerusalem winter, four households near the Castel become entwined: a student couple, their landlords, parents grieving a son killed in war, and a Palestinian labourer searching for the house his family fled.
Sapir 2004 · Shortlist
חיים על נייר זכוכית · Hayim al neyar zekhukhit
Yoram Kaniuk · 73 when first published
Novel · 417 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:After recovering from wounds suffered in Israel's War of Independence, the author recalls his years as a young painter in 1950s New York, a time of hunger for passion and for a life unlike the one he had known.
Sapir 2003 · Shortlist
חלקים אנושיים · Halakim enoshiyim
Orly Castel-Bloom · 42 when first published
Novel · 249 pages
AI-generated summary:Six Israelis of different backgrounds and classes, with their friends and children, try to get through a winter of unprecedented storms after years of drought, while a deadly epidemic called the Saudi flu spreads.
Sapir 2002 · Winner
שאהבה נפשי · She-ahavah nafshi
Gail Hareven · 41 when first published
Novel · 331 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A girl falls in love with a young man and devotes her whole life to him, refusing every rational explanation of her surrender.
Sapir 2002 · Shortlist
הכלה המשחררת · Ha-kalah ha-meshahreret
A. B. Yehoshua · 65 when first published
Novel · 568 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Around 1998, Yohanan Rivlin, a Haifa orientalist married to a judge, has spent five years tormented by his son's divorce after a single year of marriage, and sets out to find the truth behind it.
Sapir 2002 · Shortlist
חמסין וציפורים משוגעות · Hamsin ve-tsiporim meshugaot
Gabriela Avigur-Rotem · 55 when first published
Novel · 401 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Loya Kaplan, a flight attendant who has avoided Israel for twenty-seven years, returns to her childhood neighbourhood in Ramat Hasharon after a lawyer tells her that her late father's friend has left her his house, on one condition.
Sapir 2002 · Shortlist
תאונות · Teunot
Yael Hedaya · 37 when first published
Novel · 453 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:A love story in 1990s Tel Aviv, a cramped and inward-looking city, whose people include couples and single parents dealing with ageing parents, desire, loss and the wish to have a child.
Sapir 2001 · Winner
מישהו לרוץ אתו · Mishehu laruts ito
David Grossman · 46 when first published
Novel · 374 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:Asaf, a shy, awkward sixteen-year-old in Jerusalem, is sent to find the owner of a big, wild dog found roaming the streets, and the dog drags him into the hidden story of Tamar, a lonely, fierce girl.
Sapir 2001 · Shortlist
בעל ואישה · Baal ve-ishah
Zeruya Shalev · 41 when first published
Novel · 311 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:Na'ama Neuman wakes one morning to find that her husband Udi, lying beside her, cannot get out of bed, and his unexplained paralysis brings back old memories and the distance that has opened between them.
Sapir 2000 · Winner
תיאום כוונות · Teum kavanot
Haim Sabato · 47 when first published
Novel · 154 pages · War, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Twenty-five years after the Yom Kippur War, a man who fought as a young tank gunner on the Golan Heights, a yeshiva student at the time, looks back on the fighting and on the closest friend who never came home.
Sapir 2000 · Shortlist
כל אשר אהבתי · Kol asher ahavti
Aharon Appelfeld · 67 when first published
Novel · 246 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In Central Europe on the eve of the Second World War, a Jewish boy grows up between his separated parents: his father, a painter, and his mother, who falls in love with a young Ukrainian, converts and marries him.
Sapir 2000 · Shortlist
חבלים · Havalim
Haim Be'er · 53 when first published
Novel · 282 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In Jerusalem at the end of the British Mandate and in the lean years after independence, a writer portrays his parents: a Jewish immigrant from Russia who clings to life and a fearless, enlightened Jerusalem woman who rebels against her family's traditions.
Sapir 2000 · Shortlist
חדר · Heder
Youval Shimoni · 44 when first published
Novel · 597 pages
AI-generated summary:Three seemingly separate stories: eight soldiers making an information film in a cramped room on an army base, an art student in Paris who leads three homeless men into a morgue to pose for a painting, and a legendary king who enslaves his people to raise a colossal monument.