Sapir Prize for Literature

Sapir 2025 · Shortlist

המורה

ha-Moreh

AITitle translated by AI:“The Teacher”

Alon Arad · 37 when first published

Novella · 141 pages · Satire

AIAI-generated summary:At a high school in a big city, a teacher hiding under his desk longs to get home and celebrate his first wedding anniversary with his wife. But the short way from his office to the school gate has become dark and full of danger.

Sapir 2025 · Shortlist

האחו החריש את אוזניי

ha-Aho he-herish et oznai

AITitle translated by AI:“The Meadow Deafened My Ears”

Anat Einhar · 55 when first published

Novel · 173 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:A woman meets a clumsy, lost, idle and childish man who was once the singer of a rock band whose star briefly rose. Together they wander the city at night, through streets, beaches, malls, sex clubs and train stations.

Sapir 2025 · Shortlist

חלום עולם הפוך

Halom olam hafukh

AITitle translated by AI:“Dream of an Upside-Down World”

Ilana Bernstein · 67 when first published

Novel · 256 pages · Love, Family

AIAI-generated summary:An elderly woman, her husband and their clever, chatty dog drive from Tel Aviv to visit their daughter and her family in Denmark. As they travel north, the wife’s fading, broken memory carries the story back to when they fell in love.

Sapir 2025 · Shortlist

במחילה מכבודה של אשת המערות

Bi-mehilah mi-kevodah shel eshet ha-me'arot

AITitle translated by AI:“With All Due Respect to the Cave Woman”

Ofir Touché Gafla · 57 when first published

Novella · 217 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:Danny was fourteen and a half when his father, a schoolteacher, disappeared. Years later a psychiatric institution in London calls to report the father’s death, and Danny and his mother fly to England, where a notebook he left behind awaits them.

Sapir 2024 · Shortlist

סדר חדש

Seder hadash

AITitle translated by AI:“A New Order”

Avner Wishnitzer · 47 when first published

Novel · 389 pages · Historical, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:Istanbul, 1807, almost spring. Two men meet on a pier at night to plot against the sultan, and a noblewoman, a senior official and a soldier back from the front are drawn into the same conspiracy as Selim III’s reforms meet fierce resistance.

Sapir 2024 · Shortlist

הבית הכחול

ha-Bayit ha-kahol

AITitle translated by AI:“The Blue House”

Dana Heifetz · 58 when first published

Novel · 271 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:A woman writes the text for an exhibition that will never take place, laid out like a dictionary of one family’s private language: a father, a mother, a daughter, a son and a dog, living in a blue house by the sea.

Sapir 2024 · Shortlist

הילד של לגיון הזרים

ha-Yeled shel Legyon ha-zarim

AITitle translated by AI:“The Child of the Foreign Legion”

Leah Aini · 61 when first published

Novel · 283 pages · Family, Migration

AIAI-generated summary:In a small Tel Aviv flat in the early 1960s, a father, a mother and their young son keep the door shut against creditors. They once had far more, until the family factory burned down, and the fire still smoulders in their lives.

Sapir 2024 · Shortlist

חביבה

Havivah

Natalie Messika · 58 when first published

Novel · 212 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Habiba Msika, a Jewish singer, actress and artist born in the Jewish quarter of Tunis, lived a stormy life that defied the conventions of her time. A chorus of voices, from her aunt to a French lover, recalls who she was.

Sapir 2023 · Shortlist

חיים

Hayim

AITitle translated by AI:“Life”

Gail Hareven · 63 when first published

Novel · 383 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A circle of friends from Jerusalem is followed from primary school in the late 1970s to the present, through love affairs, weddings, divorces, celebrations and disasters.

Sapir 2023 · Shortlist

סימני שיניים

Simane shinayim

AITitle translated by AI:“Teeth Marks”

Hanoch Marmari · 74 when first published

Novel · 343 pages · Coming of age

AIAI-generated summary:On Mount Carmel in the 1960s, a dreamy, cynical teenager drifts through smoking corners, parties and first loves while expulsion from a strict elite high school hangs over him and his friends.

Sapir 2023 · Shortlist

ביוטופ

Biotop

AITitle translated by AI:“Biotope”

Orly Castel-Bloom · 62 when first published

Novel · 233 pages · Satire

AIAI-generated summary:A Francophile failure, let go from his university teaching job, shuts himself up in his Tel Aviv flat in the middle of an endless traffic jam, until he inherits a house in Normandy.

Sapir 2023 · Shortlist

הו-מאמה

Ho-mamah

Tami Bezaleli · 70 when first published

Novel · 275 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A Jerusalem librarian, secretly a gifted children's illustrator working under a pen name, lives alone in the basement flat of the late aunt who raised her, until she decides to write a children's book herself.

Sapir 2022 · Shortlist

השתקן

Ha-shatkan

AITitle translated by AI:“The Silent One”

Ari Liberman · 52 when first published

Novel · 247 pages · Family, War, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:After the death of his taciturn father, who ran a non-kosher deli in southern Israel and despised religion, a son finds two scrolls pinned with a swastika and at last reads the Yiddish diary inside.

Sapir 2022 · Shortlist

חמתו של תמוז

Hamato shel Tamuz

AITitle translated by AI:“The Heat of Tammuz”

Ilana Bernstein · 64 when first published

Novel · 224 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:On a scorching evening in a small village, wedding guests wait outside while the young bride lies on a sofa in her white dress with her husband-to-be, his twin brother and their father.

Sapir 2022 · Shortlist

כולנו החמישה

Kulanu ha-hamishah

AITitle translated by AI:“All Five of Us”

Sami Berdugo · 52 when first published

Novel · 311 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:A disillusioned writer in his fifties keeps putting off the drive to his eldest brother, who has barricaded himself at home and will open the door only to his siblings.

Sapir 2022 · Shortlist

אבנים

Avanim

AITitle translated by AI:“Stones”

Tsahi Farber · 58 when first published

Novel · 270 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:In a remote southern village in the early 1950s, a truck driver struggles to keep the gravestone of his baby son from sinking into the ground.

Sapir 2021 · Shortlist

תחנות ביניים

Tahanot benayim

AITitle translated by AI:“Stations in Between”

Boris Zaidman · 57 when first published

Novel · 409 pages · Migration, Crime

AIAI-generated summary:After three years in Lebanon, a discharged soldier guards a desert airfield on the Egyptian border to pay for a trip back to the snowy city of his childhood in the crumbling Soviet Union.

Sapir 2021 · Shortlist

Conviction

אמונה · Emunah

Dror Mishani · 46 when first published

Novel · 320 pages · Crime · Avraham Avraham, book 4

AIAI-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 2021 · Shortlist

הלשון נושלה

Ha-lashon nushlah

Shimon Adaf · 49 when first published

Novel · 595 pages · Speculative

AIAI-generated summary:In the town of Mevo Yam, an eleven-year-old boy is drawn by his friends into the secrets of an overgrown garden around an abandoned mental-health clinic next to his mother's house.

Sapir 2021 · Shortlist

אף אחד לא עוזב את פאלו אלטו

Af ehad lo ozev et Palo Alto

AITitle translated by AI:“Nobody Leaves Palo Alto”

Yaniv Iczkovits · 45 when first published

Novel · 405 pages · Crime

AIAI-generated summary:One corpse too many turns up in the anatomy lab of the Technion's medical school, drawing a police investigator in the middle of a divorce into a case that links several lives across two decades.

Sapir 2020 · Shortlist

ויקי ויקטוריה

Viki Viktoryah

Gai Ad · 57 when first published

Novel · 219 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:A young single mother leaves her parents' home and moves to Tel Aviv with her small son, and her arrival unsettles the lives of the people around her.

Sapir 2020 · Shortlist

נשמות

Neshamot

AITitle translated by AI:“Souls”

Roy Chen · 40 when first published

Novel · 325 pages · Speculative, Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A quiet, chubby man who lives with his mother in a crumbling housing-block flat claims his soul has passed through many bodies over four centuries, from Eastern Europe to Venice and Morocco.

Sapir 2020 · Shortlist

נחמיה

Nehemyah

AITitle translated by AI:“Nehemiah”

Yakov Z. Mayer · 35 when first published

Novel · 335 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:In the seventeenth century, a learned but shady scholar with six fingers on one hand sets out from Poland with stolen treasure to join Sabbatai Zevi, the newly proclaimed messiah.

Sapir 2020 · Shortlist

אבא, בן, סבתא דינה

Aba, ben, savta Dinah

AITitle translated by AI:“Father, Son, Grandma Dina”

Yosef Bar-Yosef · 87 when first published

Short stories · 180 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:Three linked novellas follow members of one family as they move in and out of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim, torn between faith, unbelief and indifference.

Sapir 2019 · Shortlist

נטל ההוכחה

Netel ha-hokhahah

AITitle translated by AI:“The Burden of Proof”

Ayelet Shamir · 54 when first published

Novel · 218 pages · Crime, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:Romano, a Haifa lawyer who has long stayed on the sidelines, takes on the defence of an Arab carpenter caught up in a violent incident and finds himself in a moral and emotional tangle rooted thirty years in the past.

Sapir 2019 · Shortlist

Three

שלוש · Shalosh

Dror Mishani · 43 when first published

Novel · 256 pages · Crime

AIAI-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 2019 · Shortlist

בגד מאש

Beged me-esh

AITitle translated by AI:“A Dress of Fire”

Michal Ben-Naftali · 56 when first published

Novella · 176 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:Two novellas of love between women: a Jerusalem student is drawn to a charismatic woman who is losing her sight and hires her to read aloud, and a woman has herself admitted to care together with her mother, who has dementia.

Sapir 2019 · Shortlist

שנות העשרים

Shenot ha-esrim

AITitle translated by AI:“The Twenties”

Yaara Shehori · 42 when first published

Novel · 208 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:As if in a dream, a woman walks again through her twenties: the army induction office, a year on a kibbutz, the big city, bad jobs, worse relationships and a broken heart, set to the soundtrack of the 1990s.

Sapir 2018 · Shortlist

أورفوار عكا

Urufwar Akka

AITitle translated by AI:“Goodbye, Acre”

Ala Hlehel · 40 when first published

Novel · Historical, War

AIAI-generated summary:In the spring of 1799 Napoleon besieges Acre, held by its ruthless Ottoman governor Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar. Inside the walls, the novel follows the governor, his court and the people caught between a tyrant and an invader.

Sapir 2018 · Shortlist

סמאדר

Semadar

Merav Nakar-Sadi · 47 when first published

Novella · 149 pages · Coming of age, Family

AIAI-generated summary:Through a summer holiday, Smadar, a girl on the edge of adolescence, stays indoors, wandering the rooms of an old house, peering out at the sweltering neighbourhood and soaking up every voice, gesture and word around her.

Sapir 2018 · Shortlist

At Night's End

יקיצה · Yekitsah

Nir Baram · 42 when first published

Novel · 304 pages · Coming of age, Family

AIAI-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 2018 · Shortlist

היה היתה

Hayoh hayetah

AITitle translated by AI:“Once Upon a Time There Was a Woman”

Yael Neeman · 58 when first published

Novel · 255 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Through years of interviews with her family, lovers, neighbours, doctor, colleagues and childhood friends, a writer pieces together the life of Pazit, a gifted and contradictory Tel Aviv woman who wanted to leave no trace behind.

Sapir 2017 · Shortlist

ארבעה אבות

Arba'ah avot

AITitle translated by AI:“Four Fathers”

Amir Ziv · 49 when first published

Novel · 313 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:A husband discovers his wife is secretly publishing love poems, a cranky neighbour objects to the balcony enclosed above his flat, and a little girl is left alone in a forest outside Jerusalem at night: three stories, years apart, that prove to be linked.

Sapir 2017 · Shortlist

Stockholm

שטוקהולם · Shtokholm

Noa Yedlin · 41 when first published

Novel · 384 pages · Satire

AIAI-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

כי גי

Ki Gi

AITitle translated by AI:“Because Guy”

Sami Berdugo · 47 when first published

Novel · 265 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Guy comes back to the town he fled at seventeen, some forty years ago, hoping to belong there again. On the first page he pushes an old acquaintance into a lime pit, and his visit only grows stranger.

Sapir 2017 · Shortlist

Take Up and Read

קום קרא · Kum kera

Shimon Adaf · 45 when first published

Novel · 688 pages · Crime

AIAI-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 · Shortlist

אישה בשמלה ירוקה

Ishah be-simlah yerukah

AITitle translated by AI:“A Woman in a Green Dress”

Maya Levi-Yaron · 66 when first published

Novel · 230 pages · Family, Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:In nine chapters that blend fact and imagination, events from many years in the family the author grew up in add up to the story of a life, with its visible and hidden sides.

Sapir 2016 · Shortlist

ספר הגברים

Sefer ha-gevarim

AITitle translated by AI:“The Book of Men”

Nano Shabtai · 40 when first published

Novel · 200 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:A woman's meetings with one man after another, each deepening the wound the last one left, make up a funny and painful collage of dates and injuries.

Sapir 2016 · Shortlist

לפעמים הבית הוא רוצח

Li-feamim ha-bayit hu rotseah

AITitle translated by AI:“Sometimes the House Is a Murderer”

Shimon Zimmer · 66 when first published

Novel · 167 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:As a summer brush fire nears their village in the Galilee, a musicologist and his psychologist wife relive the death of their son during his army service, while their daughter prepares to leave on a long journey.

Sapir 2016 · Shortlist

The Slaughterman's Daughter

תיקון אחר חצות · Tikun ahar hatsot

Yaniv Iczkovits · 40 when first published

Novel · 432 pages · Historical, Family

AIAI-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 · Shortlist

תמונות עירום

Temunot erom

AITitle translated by AI:“Nude Pictures”

Anat Einhar · 45 when first published

Short stories · 211 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Stories in which forbidden desire is acted on or avenged: two women on the same bus each head off to settle a score, a grandmother's spam e-mails awaken her sexuality, and a soldier at a remote base must paint a giant portrait on a bunker.

Sapir 2015 · Shortlist

עריק

Arik

AITitle translated by AI:“Deserter”

Ilai Rowner · 36 when first published

Novel · 205 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Having run away from the army and set fire to his uniform, a young man keeps only his blackened dog tag. Shelter and a job bring no peace: hunted and at war with himself, he seems marked for an early death.

Sapir 2015 · Shortlist

סיפור הווה על פני הארץ

Sipur hoveh al pene ha-arets

AITitle translated by AI:“A Present Story upon the Land”

Sami Berdugo · 44 when first published

Novel · 253 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:At forty-eight, Marcel Ben-Hamo still doesn't know what to do with his life. Leaving his makeshift flat, his father and his sister, who is raising her son alone, he travels back to the places across Israel where his past once took strange turns.

Sapir 2015 · Shortlist

האוטוביוגרפיה של ז'אן ריבן

Ha-otobiyografyah shel Zhan Riven

AITitle translated by AI:“The Autobiography of Jean Riven”

Yotam Reuveny · 66 when first published

Novel · 233 pages · Autofiction, Migration

AIAI-generated summary:A writer peels away the identities he has lived through: a Jewish tailor's son in a communist Romanian village, an orphaned immigrant in the dunes of Ashdod, a gay man, a drinker, a mystic and, above all, an artist.

Sapir 2014 · Shortlist

המאחרים

ha-Me'aharim

AITitle translated by AI:“The Latecomers”

Agur Schiff · 58 when first published

Novel · 369 pages · Politics, War

AIAI-generated summary:A retired high-school teacher who lives alone lies in wait for the army chief of staff and shoots at him, and the question is why: ideology, a cry for attention, or something wholly personal.

Sapir 2014 · Shortlist

טווס בחדר המדרגות

Tavas be-hadar ha-madregot

AITitle translated by AI:“A Peacock in the Stairwell”

Galit Distel Atbaryan · 43 when first published

Novel · 479 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:Three siblings raised in a small Ramat Gan flat by a brutal, handsome father now lead scattered adult lives, until he takes his own life in front of them and long-blurred truths come into focus.

Sapir 2014 · Shortlist

לילה ולואיס

Lilah ve-Luis

Hagit Grossman · 38 when first published

Novel · 207 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:Lila and Louis, a young, charismatic couple of artists, fight to live and create in today's materialistic Israel, joined by their baby daughter and by a demon freed from the attic of Lila's childhood flat.

Sapir 2014 · Shortlist

בת המקום

Bat ha-makom

AITitle translated by AI:“Daughter of the Place”

Leah Aini · 52 when first published

Short stories · 285 pages · Coming of age, Family

AIAI-generated summary:A short novel about an intellectually disabled Christian woman in Florida who cares for the elderly Jewish woman who took her in, paired with a novella about a Bat Yam girl at a private north Tel Aviv high school in 1976.

Sapir 2013 · Shortlist

A Possibility of Violence

אפשרות של אלימות · Efsharut shel alimut

Dror Mishani · 38 when first published

Novel · 259 pages · Crime, Family · Avraham Avraham, book 2

AIAI-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 2013 · Shortlist

צילה

Tsilah

Judith Katzir · 50 when first published

Novel · 509 pages · Family, Historical, Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:After the First World War a woman wanders Palestine with her five children, living for a quarter of a century with both her husband Lazar and Hanan, a younger lover who helps raise the family.

Sapir 2013 · Shortlist

כלה

Kalah

AITitle translated by AI:“Bride”

Ora Ahimeir · 71 when first published

Novel · 262 pages · Family, Historical, Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:Sixty years after her mother vanished from her life when she was ten, a woman finds a yellowed scrap of cardboard and sets out to uncover her mother's secrets in Safed, northern Hungary and Mandate Jerusalem.

Sapir 2013 · Shortlist

גן נעמי

Gan Naomi

AITitle translated by AI:“Naomi's Kindergarten”

Yishai Sarid · 48 when first published

Novel · 260 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:A veteran nursery-school teacher in a Tel Aviv neighbourhood near the sea learns that a smart architect now owns her premises and wants her out, and resolves to fight for her school and her values.

Sapir 2012 · Shortlist

מט ילדים

Mat yeladim

Bella Shaier · 54 when first published

Short stories · 219 pages · Coming of age, Migration

AIAI-generated summary:Two novellas and a story: gifted, lonely children in a Chernivtsi courtyard, a Tel Aviv woman's long wait to marry her lover, and a new immigrant cleaner who pays twice for every bus ride.

Sapir 2012 · Shortlist

סוסית

Susit

AITitle translated by AI:“Filly”

Leah Aini · 50 when first published

Novel · 232 pages · Satire

AIAI-generated summary:Alexandra 'Sasha' Zeit, known as Susit, has spent seven years making her home in El Paso, Texas, when she inherits a farm, stable included, in Israel's coastal plain.

Sapir 2012 · Shortlist

הילד האחרון של המאה

ha-Yeled ha-aharon shel ha-me'ah

AITitle translated by AI:“The Last Child of the Century”

Sami Berdugo · 41 when first published

Short stories · 312 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:Stories and short novellas from 1998 to 2010 about solitary heroes in families that are always missing someone, many of them immigrants or their children on the margins, each facing a crisis in that small, closed world.

Sapir 2012 · Shortlist

Petty Business

בזעיר אנפין · Bi-ze'ir anpin

Yirmi Pinkus · 46 when first published

Novel · 256 pages · Family, Satire

AIAI-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 2011 · Shortlist

ארטור

Artur

Dan Benaya Seri · 76 when first published

Novel · 380 pages · Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:In a poor Sephardi quarter of Jerusalem under British rule, a family comes apart as each member craves affection: a disturbed mother, a tiny and unhappy husband, two neglected children and domineering grandparents.

Sapir 2011 · Shortlist

היברו פבלישינג קומפני

Hibru poblishing kompani

AITitle translated by AI:“Hebrew Publishing Company”

Matan Hermoni · 42 when first published

Novel · 270 pages · Historical, Migration

AIAI-generated summary:Among the Jewish immigrants of New York's Lower East Side early in the twentieth century, a boy apprenticed to a typesetter at a Yiddish pulp publisher swears to become its most popular author.

Sapir 2011 · Shortlist

יולנדה

Yolandah

Moshe Sakal · 35 when first published

Novel · 217 pages · Family, Autofiction, Coming of age

AIAI-generated summary:A writer revisits his boyhood and teenage years and his intimate bond with his grandmother Yolanda, a Cairo-born beauty who never felt at home in Israel, and finds a novel his banished grandfather wrote in secret.

Sapir 2011 · Shortlist

חיי חורף

Haye horef

AITitle translated by AI:“Winter Life”

Orly Castel-Bloom · 50 when first published

Short stories · 174 pages · Satire

AIAI-generated summary:Six stories about people knocked off balance by a journey or a break from routine, from a Jewish divorcé running a counterfeit-jeans factory in Cairo to an Israeli researcher snowbound in a remote American town.

Sapir 2010 · Shortlist

הביתה

ha-Baitah

AITitle translated by AI:“Homeward”

Assaf Inbari · 41 when first published

Novel · 276 pages · Historical, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:Young Jews who have abandoned family, mother tongue and Russia set up a kibbutz meant to do without private households and possessions; the book follows the commune from its founding days to its collapse.

Sapir 2010 · Shortlist

ורד הלבנון

Vered ha-Levanon

AITitle translated by AI:“Rose of Lebanon”

Leah Aini · 47 when first published

Novel · 543 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction, War

AIAI-generated summary:During the 1982 Lebanon war a young soldier from Bat Yam volunteers on a rehabilitation ward under a false name and tells a gravely wounded soldier the story of her childhood in a poor neighbourhood.

Sapir 2010 · Shortlist

Good People

אנשים טובים · Anashim tovim

Nir Baram · 34 when first published

Novel · 421 pages · Historical, War, Politics

AIAI-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

Second Person Singular

גוף שני יחיד · Guf sheni yahid

Sayed Kashua · 35 when first published

Novel · 352 pages · Love

AIAI-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 2008 · Shortlist

פסנתר בחורף

Psanter ba-horef

AITitle translated by AI:“Piano in Winter”

Ayelet Shamir · 43 when first published

Novel · 315 pages

AIAI-generated summary:On a stormy December night, four men and two women on their way back to Tel Aviv insist on drinking at a quiet piano bar on the edge of a remote village, long after its owner wants to close.

Sapir 2008 · Shortlist

המינגווי וגשם הציפורים המתות

Hemingway ve-geshem ha-tsiporim ha-metot

AITitle translated by AI:“Hemingway and the Rain of Dead Birds”

Boris Zaidman · 43 when first published

Novel · 221 pages · Migration, Coming of age

AIAI-generated summary:A prickly young Tel Avivian and the seven-year-old Soviet boy he once was, waiting alone for the Germans to come for him as they came for his grandfather, live side by side in two worlds that never meet.

Sapir 2008 · Shortlist

יתומים

Yetomim

AITitle translated by AI:“Orphans”

Sami Berdugo · 36 when first published

Short stories · 196 pages · Family, Coming of age

AIAI-generated summary:Two mirror-image novellas: a father of North African descent tries to reach his two small children after his wife vanishes, and a plump teenager waiting to be drafted learns his mother is pregnant at fifty-two.

Sapir 2008 · Shortlist

מקופלת

Mekupelet

AITitle translated by AI:“Folded”

Tamar Gelbetz · 49 when first published

Novel · 187 pages · Love, Family

AIAI-generated summary:After twenty years together, a man tells his wife that he is unhappy and leaves her, their daughter and their home. Alone, she pleads, falls apart, and slowly learns to live without him.

Sapir 2007 · Shortlist

הרוצחים

ha-Rotsehim

AITitle translated by AI:“The Murderers”

Dror Burstein · 36 when first published

Novel · 652 pages · Crime

AIAI-generated summary:In June 1995, a 33-year-old literary critic with a habit of small literary thefts is talked into robbing a library by a poet friend over plates of hummus in Jerusalem.

Sapir 2007 · Shortlist

מחזיר החלומות

Mahzir ha-halomot

AITitle translated by AI:“The Dream Returner”

Nir Baram · 30 when first published

Novel · 408 pages · Speculative, Love, Family

AIAI-generated summary:A boy wakes one night to find he can give dreams back to the people who dreamed them. Ten years later, as a storm upends Tel Aviv and the sun rises later every morning, he uses the gift on the woman he loves.

Sapir 2007 · Shortlist

שחיטה שחורה

Shehitah shehorah

AITitle translated by AI:“Black Slaughter”

Shachar Magen · 30 when first published

Novel · 345 pages · Crime, Nature

AIAI-generated summary:The chief vet of a regional slaughterhouse is called to sign death certificates for calves slaughtered on a farm, and is drawn into a wider affair of illegal slaughter, in which she herself is soon accused.

Sapir 2007 · Shortlist

אהבה עברית

Ahavah ivrit

AITitle translated by AI:“Hebrew Love”

Shoshi Breiner · 54 when first published

Short stories · 233 pages · Love, Family

AIAI-generated summary:Three stories and two novellas follow Israeli lovers in Tel Aviv and Haifa and on journeys to Paris, Moscow and Agra, who long for a simple love but cannot easily escape their parents' history.

Sapir 2006 · Shortlist

מכונת הנצח של אלכס

Mekhonat ha-netsah shel Aleks

AITitle translated by AI:“Alex's Eternity Machine”

Hagar Yanai · 32 when first published

Novel · 340 pages · Coming of age, Love

AIAI-generated summary:In a foggy Golan Heights winter, a sullen, rebellious woman soldier drifts between army bases, still bound to the boy she loved in her home town, a physicist's son who wanted to defy the laws of nature.

Sapir 2006 · Shortlist

ספינת הבנות

Sefinat ha-banot

AITitle translated by AI:“The Ship of Girls”

Michal Zamir · 41 when first published

Novel · 191 pages · Coming of age

AIAI-generated summary:A clerk not yet twenty arrives for her compulsory service at the army's command and staff college, replacing a soldier who has shot herself, and enters a closed world of young women soldiers and senior officers.

Sapir 2006 · Shortlist

באהבה, נטליה

Be-ahavah, Natalyah

AITitle translated by AI:“With Love, Natalia”

Ruth Almog · 69 when first published

Novel · 260 pages · Love, Family

AIAI-generated summary:From just after the Six-Day War to the late 1980s, a gifted, uninhibited Israeli artist writes letters to her married lover and to her closest friend about her art, her marriage, her children and her country.

Sapir 2006 · Shortlist

Eden

עדן · Eden

Yael Hedaya · 41 when first published

Novel · 496 pages · Family, Coming of age

AIAI-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 · Shortlist

Death of a Monk

מות הנזיר · Mot ha-nazir

Alon Hilu · 32 when first published

Novel · 307 pages · Historical, Love

AIAI-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

Homesick

ארבעה בתים וגעגוע · Arba'ah batim ve-ga'agu'a

Eshkol Nevo · 33 when first published

Novel · 374 pages · Family, Love, Politics

AIAI-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 2005 · Shortlist

וכי נחש ממית?

Ve-khi nahash memit?

AITitle translated by AI:“Does the Snake Kill?”

Israel Segal · 60 when first published

Novel · 249 pages · Family, Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:Two brothers meet at their mother's funeral after years of estrangement: the younger, a senior media figure who cut his ties to the family, and the elder, who has become a leading figure in the ultra-Orthodox world.

Sapir 2005 · Shortlist

מקום אחר ועיר זרה

Makom aher ve-ir zarah

AITitle translated by AI:“Another Place and a Foreign City”

Maya Arad · 32 when first published

Novel · 190 pages · Migration, Love

AIAI-generated summary:In early-1990s Tel Aviv, a young woman soldier in the army's education corps is told to write a booklet on Israeli identity and to help a lone soldier who has just immigrated from Canada settle in.

Sapir 2004 · Shortlist

אבנר ברנר

Avner Brenner

Dror Burstein · 33 when first published

Novel · 248 pages

AIAI-generated summary:In 1987 the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz comes to lecture at a high school in a seaside town, but a police investigation begins instead, and the gates are locked on him, on the whole school and on three of its students, whose family stories begin to unfold.

Sapir 2004 · Shortlist

פרא אציל

Pere atsil

AITitle translated by AI:“Noble Savage”

Dudu Busi · 40 when first published

Novel · 270 pages · Coming of age, Family

AIAI-generated summary:Eli, an opinionated teenager with an eating disorder and a compulsive reader, grows up in a shack neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv with his mother and her husband, a couple of recovering drug addicts.

Sapir 2004 · Shortlist

מתום עד תום

Mi-tom ad tom

Hanoch Bartov · 77 when first published

Novel · 543 pages · Love, Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Elisha Kruk, released from the British army at the end of the Second World War, and Noga, the woman he loves, share a life together over more than fifty years of Israeli history.

Sapir 2004 · Shortlist

Life on Sandpaper

חיים על נייר זכוכית · Hayim al neyar zekhukhit

Yoram Kaniuk · 73 when first published

Novel · 417 pages · Autofiction

AIAI-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

בושות

Bushot

AITitle translated by AI:“Shames”

Avshalom Kaveh · 56 when first published

Short stories · 254 pages

AIAI-generated summary:In the opening story of this collection, a young man who goes to sea after the army finds that his father will no longer speak to him directly, only through a third party, usually his friend the postman.

Sapir 2003 · Shortlist

צלו של רוזנדורף

Tsilo shel Rosendorf

AITitle translated by AI:“Rosendorf's Shadow”

Nathan Shaham · 76 when first published

Novel · 212 pages

AIAI-generated summary:The German-Jewish writer Egon Löwenthal, who once shadowed a string quartet and recorded its story, visits Israel and meets the son of its leader Rosendorf, a historian of Germany's dark years.

Sapir 2003 · Shortlist

Human Parts

חלקים אנושיים · Halakim enoshiyim

Orly Castel-Bloom · 42 when first published

Novel · 249 pages

AIAI-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 · Shortlist

The Liberated Bride

הכלה המשחררת · Ha-kalah ha-meshahreret

A. B. Yehoshua · 65 when first published

Novel · 568 pages · Family, Politics

AIAI-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

Heatwave and Crazy Birds

חמסין וציפורים משוגעות · Hamsin ve-tsiporim meshugaot

Gabriela Avigur-Rotem · 55 when first published

Novel · 401 pages · Family

AIAI-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

לליה

Lalya

Marina Groslerner · 33 when first published

Novel · 214 pages · Coming of age, Migration, Love

AIAI-generated summary:A girl who came to Israel from the Soviet Union at the age of five grows up in the harsh Ashdod of the 1970s, the daughter of a warm, weak father and a hard mother who cannot return love.

Sapir 2002 · Shortlist

Accidents

תאונות · Teunot

Yael Hedaya · 37 when first published

Novel · 453 pages · Love, Family

AIAI-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 · Shortlist

אושר פתאומי

Osher pitomi

AITitle translated by AI:“Sudden Happiness”

Iris Leal · 40 when first published

Novel · 212 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:Daniel, a successful writer in his forties, leaves his wife and daughter for a remote fishing village in the north to write his most ambitious book, where a meeting with the district doctor, Elazar, upsets all his plans.

Sapir 2001 · Shortlist

שתיקה

Shetikah

AITitle translated by AI:“Silence”

Joshua Sobol · 61 when first published

Novel · 223 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:In 2020 a man of about eighty, who has kept silent all his life and never written a word of his own, sets down his story and the colourful events of the village he grew up in.

Sapir 2001 · Shortlist

בשוכבי ובקומי, אישה

Be-shokhvi uve-kumi, ishah

AITitle translated by AI:“When I Lie Down and When I Rise, a Woman”

Mira Magen · 50 when first published

Novel · 284 pages · Love, Family

AIAI-generated summary:Zohara, an unmarried hospital nurse, has a baby and gives herself wholly to motherhood, until a man knocks on her door and she must ask whether she can be a mother and a beloved woman at once.

Sapir 2001 · Shortlist

Husband and Wife

בעל ואישה · Baal ve-ishah

Zeruya Shalev · 41 when first published

Novel · 311 pages · Love, Family

AIAI-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 · Shortlist

All Whom I Have Loved

כל אשר אהבתי · Kol asher ahavti

Aharon Appelfeld · 67 when first published

Novel · 246 pages · Family, Coming of age

AIAI-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

The Pure Element of Time

חבלים · Havalim

Haim Be'er · 53 when first published

Novel · 282 pages · Family, Autofiction

AIAI-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

שברים שלמים

Shevarim shelemim

AITitle translated by AI:“Whole Fragments”

Ruth Bondy · 74 when first published

Nonfiction · 223 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A journalist and translator tells her own life: a youth in Prague, survival under Nazi terror, and a new beginning in the newly founded state of Israel.

Sapir 2000 · Shortlist

A Room

חדר · Heder

Youval Shimoni · 44 when first published

Novel · 597 pages

AIAI-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.