Winners of the ‘Book of the Year’ Award by the Ministry of Culture

The Ministry of Culture and Sports annually awards the Minister of Culture Award in the field of Hebrew literary creation. The awards are intended to encourage Hebrew literary creation, as well as to raise the profile of the Hebrew language as an ironclad asset of the Jewish people and its culture.

The Winners Are!

Bimat Kedem Publishing / “Love in Safed” / Shoshana Shabbo / Editor: Yitzhak Gormazano Goren
‘Love in Safed’ (1942) is the second and last novel by Shoshana Shabbo (1910-1992), one of the first Hebrew female writers in Israel. At its center is a love that breaks through barriers between the daughter of the rabbi of the Sephardic community in Safed and a man who is not the groom destined for her by her father. This reissue includes, as an afterword, essays by researchers Prof. Yaffe Barlowitz and Dr. Katsia Alon.

Bimat Kedem Publishing aims to republish all of Shabbo’s writings, make them accessible to readers, and encourage the writing of articles and studies about her. This undertaking contributed greatly to her later recognition as a writer who was ahead of her time. Her ‘pre-feminist’ writing challenged the Zionist-labor literature of the Yishuv and rebelled against the patriarchal conservatism of her time. Therefore, we found ‘Love in Safed’ worthy of the award for best book publication. 

Kibbutz Hameuchad Publishing/ “Tickets for Sammy Davis” – /Yehudit Hendel/ Edited by: Dr. Guy Erlich

‘Tickets for Sammy Davis’ brings together for the first time a hidden novella and early stories by the writer Yehudit Hendel (1921-2014), one of the most important and prominent in Hebrew literature and winner of the Israel Prize (2003). The novella ‘Tickets for Sammy Davis’ takes place during the War of Attrition.

At its center is a triangular relationship between a naval commando who fell in battle, his wife, and his best friend. The early stories, from the 1940s, some of which were published in newspapers of the time, deal openly and radically with Holocaust survivors, mourning and bereavement, and the place of the ‘other’ in Israeli society. They contain signs of poetics that will be identified with Hendel’s work as a whole.

The latter offers a discussion of the body of her work and the figure of the “early Hendel”. The book brings together for the first time a significant corpus of work by one of the writers The originality and importance of Israeli literature. Therefore, we found ‘Tickets for Sammy Davis’ worthy of the award for publishing masterpiece books.

Published by Heva Laor / “Yona Wallach: Poems Outside the Books” / Edited by: Oded Carmeli and Shani Poker

‘Yona Wallach, Poems Outside the Books’ is a book that collects all of Yona Wallach’s poems that were not included in the canonical libraries. In our opinion, the act of gathering grants Yona Wallach the respect that poets of her circle and generation have long earned, and gives readers an uncensored encounter with a central cultural heroine and beloved poet.

From the book emerges a different image of Wallach, different from the one that has been fixed in the collective imagination over the years – as she says in one of the poems in the book: “And the doe / She is not me.” The effort invested in producing the book is a testament to the editors’ great love for the avant-garde, which is the lifeblood of every renewed culture.

Based on the press release of the Ministry of Culture. Pic AI-generated. Illustrative