All prizes Israel
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.
Sapir 2025 · Shortlist
ha-Moreh
Title translated by AI:“The Teacher”
Alon Arad · 37 when first published
Novella · 141 pages · Satire
AI-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
ha-Aho he-herish et oznai
Title translated by AI:“The Meadow Deafened My Ears”
Anat Einhar · 55 when first published
Novel · 173 pages · Love
AI-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
Halom olam hafukh
Title translated by AI:“Dream of an Upside-Down World”
Ilana Bernstein · 67 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Love, Family
AI-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
Bi-mehilah mi-kevodah shel eshet ha-me'arot
Title translated by AI:“With All Due Respect to the Cave Woman”
Ofir Touché Gafla · 57 when first published
Novella · 217 pages · Family
AI-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
Seder hadash
Title translated by AI:“A New Order”
Avner Wishnitzer · 47 when first published
Novel · 389 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-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
ha-Bayit ha-kahol
Title translated by AI:“The Blue House”
Dana Heifetz · 58 when first published
Novel · 271 pages · Family
AI-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
ha-Yeled shel Legyon ha-zarim
Title translated by AI:“The Child of the Foreign Legion”
Leah Aini · 61 when first published
Novel · 283 pages · Family, Migration
AI-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
Havivah
Natalie Messika · 58 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · Historical
AI-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
Hayim
Title translated by AI:“Life”
Gail Hareven · 63 when first published
Novel · 383 pages
AI-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
Simane shinayim
Title translated by AI:“Teeth Marks”
Hanoch Marmari · 74 when first published
Novel · 343 pages · Coming of age
AI-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
Biotop
Title translated by AI:“Biotope”
Orly Castel-Bloom · 62 when first published
Novel · 233 pages · Satire
AI-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
Ho-mamah
Tami Bezaleli · 70 when first published
Novel · 275 pages
AI-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
Ha-shatkan
Title translated by AI:“The Silent One”
Ari Liberman · 52 when first published
Novel · 247 pages · Family, War, Historical
AI-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
Hamato shel Tamuz
Title translated by AI:“The Heat of Tammuz”
Ilana Bernstein · 64 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family
AI-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
Kulanu ha-hamishah
Title translated by AI:“All Five of Us”
Sami Berdugo · 52 when first published
Novel · 311 pages · Family
AI-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
Avanim
Title translated by AI:“Stones”
Tsahi Farber · 58 when first published
Novel · 270 pages · Historical
AI-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
Tahanot benayim
Title translated by AI:“Stations in Between”
Boris Zaidman · 57 when first published
Novel · 409 pages · Migration, Crime
AI-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
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 2021 · Shortlist
Ha-lashon nushlah
Shimon Adaf · 49 when first published
Novel · 595 pages · Speculative
AI-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
Af ehad lo ozev et Palo Alto
Title translated by AI:“Nobody Leaves Palo Alto”
Yaniv Iczkovits · 45 when first published
Novel · 405 pages · Crime
AI-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
Viki Viktoryah
Gai Ad · 57 when first published
Novel · 219 pages · Family
AI-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
Neshamot
Title translated by AI:“Souls”
Roy Chen · 40 when first published
Novel · 325 pages · Speculative, Family, Historical
AI-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
Nehemyah
Title translated by AI:“Nehemiah”
Yakov Z. Mayer · 35 when first published
Novel · 335 pages · Historical
AI-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
Aba, ben, savta Dinah
Title translated by AI:“Father, Son, Grandma Dina”
Yosef Bar-Yosef · 87 when first published
Short stories · 180 pages · Family
AI-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
Netel ha-hokhahah
Title translated by AI:“The Burden of Proof”
Ayelet Shamir · 54 when first published
Novel · 218 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-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
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 2019 · Shortlist
Beged me-esh
Title translated by AI:“A Dress of Fire”
Michal Ben-Naftali · 56 when first published
Novella · 176 pages · Love
AI-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
Shenot ha-esrim
Title translated by AI:“The Twenties”
Yaara Shehori · 42 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction
AI-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
Urufwar Akka
Title translated by AI:“Goodbye, Acre”
Ala Hlehel · 40 when first published
Novel · Historical, War
AI-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
Semadar
Merav Nakar-Sadi · 47 when first published
Novella · 149 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-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
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 2018 · Shortlist
Hayoh hayetah
Title translated by AI:“Once Upon a Time There Was a Woman”
Yael Neeman · 58 when first published
Novel · 255 pages
AI-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
Arba'ah avot
Title translated by AI:“Four Fathers”
Amir Ziv · 49 when first published
Novel · 313 pages · Love
AI-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
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
Ki Gi
Title translated by AI:“Because Guy”
Sami Berdugo · 47 when first published
Novel · 265 pages
AI-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
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 · Shortlist
Ishah be-simlah yerukah
Title translated by AI:“A Woman in a Green Dress”
Maya Levi-Yaron · 66 when first published
Novel · 230 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-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
Sefer ha-gevarim
Title translated by AI:“The Book of Men”
Nano Shabtai · 40 when first published
Novel · 200 pages · Love
AI-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
Li-feamim ha-bayit hu rotseah
Title translated by AI:“Sometimes the House Is a Murderer”
Shimon Zimmer · 66 when first published
Novel · 167 pages · Family
AI-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
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 · Shortlist
Temunot erom
Title translated by AI:“Nude Pictures”
Anat Einhar · 45 when first published
Short stories · 211 pages
AI-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
Arik
Title translated by AI:“Deserter”
Ilai Rowner · 36 when first published
Novel · 205 pages
AI-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
Sipur hoveh al pene ha-arets
Title translated by AI:“A Present Story upon the Land”
Sami Berdugo · 44 when first published
Novel · 253 pages · Family
AI-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
Ha-otobiyografyah shel Zhan Riven
Title translated by AI:“The Autobiography of Jean Riven”
Yotam Reuveny · 66 when first published
Novel · 233 pages · Autofiction, Migration
AI-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
ha-Me'aharim
Title translated by AI:“The Latecomers”
Agur Schiff · 58 when first published
Novel · 369 pages · Politics, War
AI-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
Tavas be-hadar ha-madregot
Title translated by AI:“A Peacock in the Stairwell”
Galit Distel Atbaryan · 43 when first published
Novel · 479 pages · Family
AI-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
Lilah ve-Luis
Hagit Grossman · 38 when first published
Novel · 207 pages · Love
AI-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
Bat ha-makom
Title translated by AI:“Daughter of the Place”
Leah Aini · 52 when first published
Short stories · 285 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-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
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 2013 · Shortlist
Tsilah
Judith Katzir · 50 when first published
Novel · 509 pages · Family, Historical, Autofiction
AI-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
Kalah
Title translated by AI:“Bride”
Ora Ahimeir · 71 when first published
Novel · 262 pages · Family, Historical, Autofiction
AI-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
Gan Naomi
Title translated by AI:“Naomi's Kindergarten”
Yishai Sarid · 48 when first published
Novel · 260 pages · Family
AI-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
Mat yeladim
Bella Shaier · 54 when first published
Short stories · 219 pages · Coming of age, Migration
AI-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
Susit
Title translated by AI:“Filly”
Leah Aini · 50 when first published
Novel · 232 pages · Satire
AI-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
ha-Yeled ha-aharon shel ha-me'ah
Title translated by AI:“The Last Child of the Century”
Sami Berdugo · 41 when first published
Short stories · 312 pages · Family
AI-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
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 2011 · Shortlist
Artur
Dan Benaya Seri · 76 when first published
Novel · 380 pages · Family, Historical
AI-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
Hibru poblishing kompani
Title translated by AI:“Hebrew Publishing Company”
Matan Hermoni · 42 when first published
Novel · 270 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-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
Yolandah
Moshe Sakal · 35 when first published
Novel · 217 pages · Family, Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-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
Haye horef
Title translated by AI:“Winter Life”
Orly Castel-Bloom · 50 when first published
Short stories · 174 pages · Satire
AI-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
ha-Baitah
Title translated by AI:“Homeward”
Assaf Inbari · 41 when first published
Novel · 276 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-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
Vered ha-Levanon
Title translated by AI:“Rose of Lebanon”
Leah Aini · 47 when first published
Novel · 543 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction, War
AI-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
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 2008 · Shortlist
Psanter ba-horef
Title translated by AI:“Piano in Winter”
Ayelet Shamir · 43 when first published
Novel · 315 pages
AI-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
Hemingway ve-geshem ha-tsiporim ha-metot
Title translated by AI:“Hemingway and the Rain of Dead Birds”
Boris Zaidman · 43 when first published
Novel · 221 pages · Migration, Coming of age
AI-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
Yetomim
Title translated by AI:“Orphans”
Sami Berdugo · 36 when first published
Short stories · 196 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-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
Mekupelet
Title translated by AI:“Folded”
Tamar Gelbetz · 49 when first published
Novel · 187 pages · Love, Family
AI-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
ha-Rotsehim
Title translated by AI:“The Murderers”
Dror Burstein · 36 when first published
Novel · 652 pages · Crime
AI-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
Mahzir ha-halomot
Title translated by AI:“The Dream Returner”
Nir Baram · 30 when first published
Novel · 408 pages · Speculative, Love, Family
AI-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
Shehitah shehorah
Title translated by AI:“Black Slaughter”
Shachar Magen · 30 when first published
Novel · 345 pages · Crime, Nature
AI-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
Ahavah ivrit
Title translated by AI:“Hebrew Love”
Shoshi Breiner · 54 when first published
Short stories · 233 pages · Love, Family
AI-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
Mekhonat ha-netsah shel Aleks
Title translated by AI:“Alex's Eternity Machine”
Hagar Yanai · 32 when first published
Novel · 340 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-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
Sefinat ha-banot
Title translated by AI:“The Ship of Girls”
Michal Zamir · 41 when first published
Novel · 191 pages · Coming of age
AI-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
Be-ahavah, Natalyah
Title translated by AI:“With Love, Natalia”
Ruth Almog · 69 when first published
Novel · 260 pages · Love, Family
AI-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
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 · 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 2005 · Shortlist
Ve-khi nahash memit?
Title translated by AI:“Does the Snake Kill?”
Israel Segal · 60 when first published
Novel · 249 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-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
Makom aher ve-ir zarah
Title translated by AI:“Another Place and a Foreign City”
Maya Arad · 32 when first published
Novel · 190 pages · Migration, Love
AI-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
Avner Brenner
Dror Burstein · 33 when first published
Novel · 248 pages
AI-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
Pere atsil
Title translated by AI:“Noble Savage”
Dudu Busi · 40 when first published
Novel · 270 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-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
Mi-tom ad tom
Hanoch Bartov · 77 when first published
Novel · 543 pages · Love, Family, Historical
AI-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
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
Bushot
Title translated by AI:“Shames”
Avshalom Kaveh · 56 when first published
Short stories · 254 pages
AI-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
Tsilo shel Rosendorf
Title translated by AI:“Rosendorf's Shadow”
Nathan Shaham · 76 when first published
Novel · 212 pages
AI-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
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 · 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
Lalya
Marina Groslerner · 33 when first published
Novel · 214 pages · Coming of age, Migration, Love
AI-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
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 · Shortlist
Osher pitomi
Title translated by AI:“Sudden Happiness”
Iris Leal · 40 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · Love
AI-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
Shetikah
Title translated by AI:“Silence”
Joshua Sobol · 61 when first published
Novel · 223 pages · Family
AI-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
Be-shokhvi uve-kumi, ishah
Title translated by AI:“When I Lie Down and When I Rise, a Woman”
Mira Magen · 50 when first published
Novel · 284 pages · Love, Family
AI-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
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 · 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
Shevarim shelemim
Title translated by AI:“Whole Fragments”
Ruth Bondy · 74 when first published
Nonfiction · 223 pages
AI-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
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.