David Grossman awarded the 2010 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade

The Board of Trustees of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade has chosen Israeli author David Grossman to be the recipient of this year’s Peace Prize. The award ceremony will take place during the Frankfurt Book Fair on Sunday, October 10, 2010 in the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt, Germany and be broadcast live on the German public TV channel ARD. The Peace Prize has been awarded since 1950 and is endowed with a sum of €25,000.

The Board of Trustees issued the following statement with regard to their choice: “The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awards the 2010 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to David Grossman. In so doing, the association and its members have chosen to honor one of Israel’s foremost authors and an active supporter of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. In his novels, essays and stories, Grossman has consistently sought to understand and describe not only his own position, but also the opinions of those who think differently.

David Grossman gives a literary voice – one that is heard throughout the world – to this difficult co-existence. His books illustrate the extent to which we can only end the cycle of violence, hatred and displacement in the Middle East by means of listening, restraint and the power of words.

In his major work “To the End of the Land,” Grossman shows the importance of language in the search for identity and warns of its increasing militarization. Faced with a reality characterized by arbitrariness, coercion and alienation, David Grossman offers us ways out of a society caught between war and peace.”

David Grossman was born in 1954 in Jerusalem and is one of Israel’s most influential writers and journalists. In his novels, stories, essays and children’s books – many of which have been translated into more than thirty languages and received prestigious awards – Grossman deals first and foremost with his country’s identity and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is also an active participant in the political debate that seeks to find a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis. 

During his studies in philosophy and theater, Grossman worked as a news editor and radio drama author and actor for Israeli radio. In 1983, he published his first novel “The Smile of the Lamb.” (Engl. 1990) He achieved worldwide recognition with his 1986 novel “See Under: Love,” which dealt with the second generation following that of the Shoah survivors. “The Yellow Wind,” a collection of observations on relations between Israelis and Arabs, was published in 1987 (Engl. 1988). In 1988, after refusing to succumb to censorship regarding Yasser Arafat's announcement of Palestinian independence – in which Arafat also spoke indirectly for the first time of Israel’s right to exist – Grossman was promptly fired. From then on, he concentrated on writing fiction and went on to publish a number of youth and children’s stories as well as novels in which he described the complexity of life in the world today. As an early supporter of the Geneva Initiative, Grossman also increasingly used political commentary to call for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. In his collection of essays “Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo” (2003), he expressed a growing disappointment with the lack of progress in solving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. 

When the Israeli-Lebanon conflict broke out in 2006, David Grossman joined with fellow authors to demand a ceasefire between the two sides. Only days later, his son Uri was killed by a Hezbollah missile. He worked through this painful experience in “To the End of the Land” (2008, Engl. 2010), an epic novel that tells of a woman’s desperate attempt to protect herself and her family life from a hard and violent reality. In this work, Grossman intertwines the woman’s journey through Israel with her memories and political events. He also shows in a striking manner the extent to which the fate of people in Israel is unequivocally tied to politics and war.

David Grossman has received a number of prestigious awards for his literary work and political activism, including the Nelly Sachs Prize (1991), the Premio Mondello (Italy, 1996), Manès Sperber Prize (2002), the Bialik Prize (Israel, 2004), the Emet Prize (Israel, 2007), Geschwister Scholl Prize (2008) and the Albatros Prize (2010).

David Grossman is married and has three children. He lives in Mevaseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem.

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