Moshe Sakal

Moshe Sakal was born in Tel Aviv in 1976 into a Jewish-Arab family with roots in Damascus and Cairo, descendants of Damascene jewelers. He lived for several years in Paris and has been based in Berlin since 2019. He is the author of six novels in Hebrew, including The Diamond Setter and Yolanda. His work has been translated into English, French, and German. His fiction explores exile, diaspora, queer identity, and the shared Arab-Jewish world before 1948. Sakal is the cofounder of Altneuland Press, the first Hebrew literary publisher established outside of Israel since 1948. He is a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and has also written for Le Monde, Libération, and Haaretz. A two-time nominee for the Sapir Prize, recipient of Israel’s Levi Eshkol Prize, Fulbright Scholar, and Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Sakal was awarded the Berlin Senate Grant for Non-German Literature in 2021.