Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Israel News

Japanese Author Honored in Israel

Best-selling Japanese author Haruki Murakami is following in the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir, Milan Kundera and Arthur Miller by accepting the most prestigious literary prize given to foreigners in Israel.

On February 15, Murakami, who is behind such works as “Norwegian Wood,” “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Kafka on the Shore,” will appear at the opening ceremony of the Jerusalem International Book Fair, where Mayor Nir Barkat and President Shimon Peres will present him with the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. The ceremony will mark the first time the prize has gone to a writer in a non-European language, and the decision to honor him was “made out of profound esteem for his artistic achievements and love of people,” in the words of festival organizers.

The author of 20 books translated into 40 languages, Murakami has had five novels appear on best-seller lists in Israel. On the festival’s Web site, he is described as “one of the more widely-read” foreign writers in Israel.

Previous winners of the Jerusalem Prize, given biennially, include Mario Vargas Llosa, Graham Greene and Susan Sontag. In publicity materials for the event, festival organizers tout their own good taste, noting that four Jerusalem Prize recipients — Bertrand Russell, Octavio Paz, V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee — later won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.