A winner of the Prime Minister's Award for Hebrew Literature and the Sapir Prize for literature (given by the Israeli government) in 2001, David Grossman is one of Israel's most celebrated and widely translated contemporary Hebrew writers. An activist in the left-wing Peace Now movement, Grossman has written much on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and his novels deal with the weighty issues of love, childhood memory, masculinity, and the Holocaust.

Grossman was born in Jerusalem, Israel, on 25 January 1954, the elder of two sons of Yitzhak and Michaela Grossman, immigrants from Galicia. His father was a bus driver and later a librarian. His mother was a house cleaner. At the age of seven he read avidly the work of Sholom Aleichem, the Yiddish classical author who was the first to write in Yiddish for children; Grossman was fascinated by Aleichem's descriptions of Eastern European Jewish life before the Holocaust. Around age...