Pardes publishers, haifa, 2021

the prize

In 2016, the German government announces a new prize for Hebrew writers around the world, the Berlin Prize for Hebrew Literature, which will return the Hebrew Literary Center to Berlin, and budget it for an inconceivable amount. Chezi, an Israeli-Jewish writer of Iraqi descent who came to Berlin following his love for his German wife Helena, is the first winner of the award - for his book "Staying in Baghdad". On the morning of the victory, while Helena is having an abortion, a political storm arises in Israel due to his winning the prize.

“The Prize” is a wild, honed and poignant satire about the literary industry - from the time the book was written to the days it was published, including editing and translating, distributing, publishing and submitting awards - and at the same time a touching novel about love and parenting, adolescence and identity. Shemoelof moves between these two axes - the soft and the sharpened - with admirable virtuosity, as he mobilizes alongside him a surge of humor, wisdom and daring.

The novel "The Prize" was on the final list of books nominated for the Shulamit Aloni's literary prize (2022) | Reviews, Articles that were written about the book (German).

See the book | Exposé | Handlung | Politisch-kultureller Inhalt | Hintergrund

An interview with Yakir Englander on "New book network", 19.07.2021 - Talking (English) on the novel "The Prize". Listen!

Kinneret Zmora publishers, Tel-Aviv, 2014

Remnants of the Cursed Book AND OTHER STORIES

Edited by Professor Yigal Schwartz and Tamar Bialik / Zmora Bitan Publishers

The Israeli poet Mati Shemoelf’s debut short story collection features the following characters: a fictional character seeking revenge on the writer that got her pregnant and gave her AIDS; an emerging writer that decides to reveal a famous author’s affairs in order to promote her book; an artist who dies during a routine procedure and tells the story of his life to a dancer who really wanted to become a poet; a Greek philosopher that twitted in his Twitter account; a frustrated Israeli writer in post-apocalyptic Berlin who finds the protagonist of his former novel seated beside him at a bar; an aging writer who sells his soul to the devil, and more...

These characters and many others reside on the margins of the literary world, pounding on its door in a desperate plea for acceptance, love and acknowledgment in the face of their flaws. Their voices collide, collapse and reflect each other, converging momentarily only to shatter to pieces again. Love and death, identity and violence, exile and homecoming all blend together in these stories, which are packed with bone-chilling figures, doubles, twins, clones, gender and identity swaps and varying states of consciousnesses.

Using hybrid language, a mix of unrestrained prose and poetic fiction, Shemoelof traps his readers in a labyrinth that is simultaneously a post-modern gothic, nightmare and a haunted romance. He floods the reader with a merciless form of fiction that is demanding, tyrannical and does not aim to please, but at the same time also irresistible, and one finds it hard to remain indifferent to its wild charm.

Professor Yigal Schwartz, Editor of the Collection

“After reading four lines my mind was made up. With some authors you need to read the entire book to see if you like it...and then there are others where you can immediately recognize a new voice that you like very much. And I think that Mati opens his mind for us and whoever reads his book can see his mind, all exposed...I have to say that after Eliana Almog [an emerging Israeli author], something new is happening [in the Israeli literary scene], there is a group of young people that are changing, becoming part of something very new, it’s a leap, a change that is happening in giant steps, it doesn’t contradict whatever came before it, but it’s a sea change. It’s happening with Mizrahi roots, and most of the authors are more cosmopolitan than their predecessors and they deal with other mediums. And a leap is considered frightening.

And you think that the road between one milestone and another is often long and unclear, it’s not a safe move. With A.B. Yehoshua you know exactly where you’re going and when. Whereas here you have certain things that you have no idea where they came from, and it’s part of the pleasure, the challenge and the fun about this book.

Yigal Schwartz is Professor of Literature at the Ben-Gurion University in Israel. He has been editor in chief of Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir Books since 2007.

See the book | List of recomendations