Israeli novelist Amos Oz, four of his books translated and published also in Albania, dies aged 79!

The author of books including Black Box, A Tale of Love and Darkness and In the Land of Israel, has died from cancer.
The esteemed Israeli novelist Amos Oz has died at the age of 79, from cancer.

The author of 18 books in Hebrew and a longtime candidate for the Nobel prize for literature, Oz was best known for novels including Black Box, In the Land of Israel and A Tale of Love and Darkness, his bestselling autobiographical novel. Much of his work, both fiction and non-fiction, explored kibbutz life and picked apart his characters’ often complex relationships with Israel and modern politics – reflective of his own.

“To those who love him, thank you,” his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger, while announcing his death on Twitter on Friday.

Born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem in 1939, Oz was raised by a Lithuanian father and Polish mother. When he was 12, his mother killed herself; two years later, he left home, and joined kibbutz, adopting the Hebrew surname Oz. Despite being raised in an irreligious home, Oz developed a fascination with religion, telling the Guardian in a 2016 interview that he began studying the New Testament as a teenager: “I realised at the age of 16 that unless I read the gospels, I would never have access to Renaissance art, to the music of Bach or the novels of Dostoevsky. So in the evenings, when the other boys went to play basketball or chase girls – I had no chance in either – I found my comfort in Jesus.”

In 2017, he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize for his final book published in English: Judas, about an old man and a young man making sense of the world in a house in Jerusalem.

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/28/amos-oz-dead-israeli-novel...