Grossman, the first Israeli writer to win the prize, is now expected to enjoy a spike in international sales for A Horse Walks Into a Bar.
Israeli author David Grossman won the Man Booker International Prize on Wednesday, sharing the $64,000 award with translator Jessica Cohen.
Grossman, the first Israeli writer to win the prize, is now expected to enjoy a spike in international sales for A Horse Walks Into a Bar.
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.
“Thank you all. I will cherish this award and this evening,” Grossman said after receiving the prize at a ceremony in central London.
“I thank first of all my wonderful, devoted, translator, Jessica Cohen,” the 63-year-old author added.
Judge Nick Barley said Grossman “attempted an ambitious high-wire act of a novel, and... Pulled it off spectacularly”.
“We were bowled over by Grossman’s willingness to take emotional as well as stylistic risks: every sentence counts, every word matters in this supreme example of the writer’s craft,” Barley added.
Since he started writing in the late 1970s after being fired from public radio following anger over his critical coverage, Grossman has won numerous Israeli and international awards.
His 1986 novel See Under: Love is seen by a number of critics as his masterpiece, delving into the Holocaust and the generation of Jews that followed.
Other works have included The Yellow Wind, a prescient, non-fiction look at Israel’s occupation ahead of the first Palestinian intifada that erupted in 1987.
His 2008 novel To the End of the Land, published after the death of his son Uri, contemplates the effects of war while portraying Israeli life.
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.
In 2011 he was part of a group of seven prominent writers from around the world to appeal to the United Nations Security Council to sanction the Syrian government over its actions in the civil war which began that year.
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 last year 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.
Anti-occupation NGO gains donation from win
An Israeli human rights group disliked by the government welcomed Thursday the donation of prize money from the Man Booker International Prize won by David Grossman.
The Israeli writer won the prize on Wednesday evening for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar, along with his US translator Jessica Cohen, with the two splitting the $64,000 award.
Cohen announced at the awards she would donate “half of the award money” to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which campaigns against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
“For almost thirty years now they have been reporting on human rights violations committed in the occupied Palestinian territories,” she said.
“It is not easy to tell uncomfortable and unflattering truths, and it’s certainly not easy to hear them, but it is essential, not only in literature but in life.”
B’Tselem spokesman Amit Gilutz welcomed the donation.
“We are thankful to her and we are determined to continue on our mission, which is to resist the occupation until it ends,” he told AFP.
Grossman, the first Israeli to win the prize, is a member of the NGO’s public council but told Israeli army radio Thursday he was wary of being a representative of any particular cause.
“When I write a story I don’t think of it as an ambassador, or even as an honorary consul. I want to tell a story.”
B’Tselem’s work on human rights issues in the occupied West Bank has seen it regularly fall foul of Israeli politicians in the current government, considered the most right wing in Israel’s history.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently floated the idea of banning all state foreign funding to NGOs, seen as targeting B’Tselem and other leftwing groups.
Culture minister Miri Regev, who has been at war with much of the country’s intellectual elite, congratulated Grossman on his victory.
In response, he urged her to see “this as an instance where literature can put our situation across in a complex, interesting and meaningful way”.
He called on the government to “not disturb literature or art from expressing all their complexities, because that is what they are for”.
Grossman’s book unfolds over the course of a stand-up show during which comedian Dovaleh 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.
