A. B. Yehoshua

Yehoshua's family had lived in Jerusalem for five generations, a rootedness he contrasted with the more recently arrived European immigrants who dominated much of Israeli literature; he served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army before studying literature and philosophy and living for years in Paris as an emissary of the Jewish Agency.

The Lover (1977) interweaves six first-person narrators searching for a woman's lover who has vanished during the chaos of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, using a stylized, almost biblical register to fuse private desire with national emergency: a formal approach he continued refining across later novels exploring Israeli identity, family, and guilt.

He taught comparative literature for decades at the University of Haifa, was a prominent and often controversial voice on Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, and died in Tel Aviv in 2022.