Award for Amos Oz

 

The Israeli writer Amos Oz is the first winner of Germany's newest – and well-endowed - prize for literature.

 

The Siegfried Lenz Prize was conferred for the first time in November 2014. The winner was Amos Oz, the Israeli writer.

The Prize comes with an endowment of €50,000. It is awarded by a blue chip jury to those writers “whose literary recountings have received recognition and whose oeuvre voices the spirit of Siegfried Lenz.”

 

Oz's works include “My Michael” and “A Perfect Peace”. They have made him Israel's best-known writer on the international level. Oz is also known for being one of Israel's most contentious intellectuals.

 

His youth was spent boycotting all German products. As he puts it: “the only thing that I could not boycott was the country's literature. Because those who boycott literature are themselves the villains.” Oz maintained a decades-long friendship with Siegfried Lenz, the German writer, who died in October 2014. Lenz's “German Lesson” is known around the world – and is one reason why he, like Oz, was the recipient of so many honors. Among those conferred upon Oz is the Peace Prize of Germany's Publishing Trade.