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Etgar Keret

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Etgar Keret (born 1967) is an Israeli writer of short stories, as well as Graphic Novels and occasional writing for television and film. His writing style is lean, utilizing everyday language, slang, and dialect. His writing has influenced many writers of his generation, as well as brought a renewed surge in the popularity of the short story form in Israel in the second half of the 1990s.

1 Literary Career
2 Other Projects
3 Works published in English
4 External links

Literary Career

His first published work was Tzinorot (Pipelines, 1992), a collection of short stories which was generally ignored. In 1993 he won first prize in the Alternative Theater Festival in Akko for which he wrote with Jonathan Bar Giora. His second book, Ga'aguai Le'Kissinger (Missing Kissinger, 1994), a collection of fifty very short stories, was more successful and brought Keret to the attention of the general public. Keret is known for his collaborations with various comics artist including Lo Banu Lehenot (Nobody Said It Was Going to Be Fun, 1996) with Rutu Modan and Simtaot Hazaam (Streets of Fury, 1997) with Asaf Hanuka. In 1999 five of his stories were translated into English, and adapted into "graphic novellas" under the joint title Jetlag. The illustrators were the five members of the Actus Tragicus collective. In 1998 Keret published Ha'Keytana Shel Kneller (Kneller's Happy Campers), a collection of short stories. The title story, the longest in the collection, follows a young man who commits suicide and goes on a quest for love in the afterlife. It appears in the English language collection of Keret's stories The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories (2004) and was also adapted into the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze (2006), with illustrations by Asaf Hanuka. The story was also adapted by director Goran Dukic into a feature-length film called Wristcutters: A Love Story starring Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Tom Waits and Will Arnett. The film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Keret's other works include the children's book Dad Runs Away with the Circus (2004), illustrated by Rutu Modan, and the short story collection Anihu (Me-him, 2002). Keret has received the Prime Minister's award for literature, as well as the Ministry of Culture's Cinema Prize. In 2006 he was chosen as an outstanding artist of the prestigious Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. Since 1995 Keret has been lecturing in the film department at Tel Aviv University. His short story "Siren", which deals with the paradoxes in modern Israeli society, is included in the curriculum for the Israeli national matriculation exam in literature.

Other Projects

Keret has also worked in Israeli television and film, including three seasons as a writer for the popular sketch show The Cameri Quintet and the story for the TV movie Aball'e (Daddy, 2001) Starring Shmil Ben Ari. The short film Malka Lev Adom (Skin Deep, 1996) which Keret wrote and directed with Ran Tal, won an Israel Film Academy award and first place in the Munich International Festival of Film Schools. $9.99, a stop motion animated feature film, is scheduled to be released in 2008. Written by Keret and director Tatia Rosenthal, it is an Israeli/Australian co-production featuring the voices of Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia and other leading Australian actors. Keret publishes some of his works on the Hebrew-language web site "Bamah Hadashah" (New Stage) which presents a platform for new works, though he has been a renowned writer even before the site was established. The film Jellyfish, a joint venture for Keret and his wife Shira Geffen, was presented at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and received the Camera d'Or. He is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva. Keret Lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and their child.

Works published in English

Short story collections

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories, New York, Toby Press, 2004, ISBN 1-59264-105-9 (paperback).

Includes "Kneller's Happy Campers" and others.

The Nimrod Flipout, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, ISBN 0-374-22243-6 (paperback).

Selections from Keret's four short story collections.

Comics

Jetlag, Tel Aviv, Actus Tragicus, 1998; Top Shelf Productions, 1999, ISBN 965-90221-0-7.
Pizzeria Kamikaze, illustrated by Asaf Hanuka, Alternative Comics, 2005, ISBN 1-891867-90-3.