Yonatan Berg

About Yonatan Berg’s work, fellow poet Eli Eliahu says that “it is written from a broad historical perspective and a universal human point of view, without conceding his own personal story”.

The youngest person ever awarded the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize, and whose first novel won the competition for debut writers held by the Ministry of Culture in cooperation with  Am Oved Press, Berg was born in Jerusalem to parents of Ukrainian and German descent. His father emigrated from Odessa to Israel  in the 1970s; his mother’s family has roots in Hamburg and Wurzburg. When Berg was four, the family moved to Psagot, an Israeli settlement near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where he was educated in a yeshiva and lived until the age of 18. The writer holds a BA in creative writing from Tel Aviv University and an MA in bibliotherapy from the University of Haifa, and currently lives in Tel Aviv. Berg is the author of three books of poetry, two novels and a memoir about growing up in a settlement. He is the author of a literary column in Haaretz, and a weekly opinion column for the Leeba web site.