Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

David Grossman Wins Man Booker International Prize

Israeli novelist David Grossman and his translator, Jessica Cohen, have won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for “A Horse Walks Into a Bar.”

Both Grossman and Amos Oz were finalists for the prize. The honor comes with a cash award of £50,000, shared equally between author and translator.

Its most recent winners were Hungarian novelist and his translator George Szirtes.

“It’s a short book, at times the main character is challenging,” said Nick Barley, chair of this year’s judges, in a video released by the Booker Foundation. “But what David Grossman achieves with this book is absolutely remarkable.”

Speaking to the Forward this spring, Cohen offered thoughts on why “A Horse Walks Into a Bar” was a powerful novel.

“Initially when you see the title, and you read the first couple pages, you think ‘Oh, he’s doing something light, this is going to be fun,’” she said. “And then you get sucked into this black hole of humanity. This is not going to be all about telling jokes, not that telling jokes is easy. It’s deceptively light and deceptively humorous.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

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.