David Grossman

Grossman worked as a journalist and radio broadcaster for Israel's national radio before turning to fiction, and has written nonfiction reportage on the occupied territories, including The Yellow Wind (1988), alongside his novels: a dual career that has made him one of Israel's most persistent literary critics of the occupation from within.

He began To the End of the Land in 2003 as his youngest son, Uri, prepared for compulsory military service; Grossman has said he believed, superstitiously, that staying inside the novel's fictional world might protect his son. Uri was killed in the final days of the 2006 Lebanon war, and Grossman returned to finish the manuscript afterward: a novel about a mother who walks out of her house so that army messengers bearing bad news can never find her.

He has continued to write fiction and essays and remains a leading voice for a negotiated peace, awarded Israel's most prominent literary and international prizes.