The 7th International Writers Festival next week in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Jerusalem, will feature leading Israeli authors together with writers from across the world in a celebration of all things literary.
The five-day festival running from May 12 to May 16 will open with a Jerusalem Prize being presented to American writer Joyce Carol Oates by Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion. It will be followed with a tribute to the late Israeli author Amos Oz, led by President Reuven Rivlin and historian Prof. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Oz’s daughter.
The festival, held in the picturesque neighborhood overlooking the Old City, offers many English-language events, including literary meetings with Oates, fellow American writer André Aciman, Syrian activist and writer Ahmad Danny Ramadan, poet and playwright Sjón from Iceland and Latin American writer Andrés Neuman.
Prominent Israeli participants include authors David Grossman, Michal Govrin and Nir Baram, as well as journalists Janan Bsoul, Dana Spector and Oshrat Kotler.
Among the topics up for discussion are immigration, the refugee experience as well as love and relationships in the #metoo era.
The festival will also feature a literary-culinary Hebrew-language event called “By Bread Alone,” in which David Kichka, chairman of the Israeli Association for Culinary Culture, and literary scholar Prof. Ariel Hirschfeld will discuss bread in the works of Yehuda Amichai, Haim Nahman Bialik and S.Y. Agnon.
“We are excited to have the opportunity to host and present a group of important and fascinating writers – some well-known and experienced, some new and promising – many of whom are appearing in Israel for the first time,” says Mishkenot Sha’ananim director Moti Schwartz.
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[Photo: Israel21c]