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Moshe Dor Receives Israel’s 2008 Prime Minster’s Award for Literature

Moshe DorThe Prime Minister’s Prize is given each year to Israeli writers who have been judged by a secret panel to have excelled among their peers. The award of $16,000 (65,000 shekels) is spread over 12 months. Dor is no stranger to prestigious awards: he has received the Bialik Prize, Israel’s top literary award, and the Israel Prize, which is given in various fields for lifetime achievement.

Born in 1932 in Tel Aviv, Moshe published his first book of poetry, White Cypresses, in 1954. Since then, he has published some 40 books, among them, poetry for adults and children, literary essays and interviews with writers. His most recent book of poetry is No Man’s Land: Selected Poems, published in 2004. His poems have been translated into 25 languages and have included several collections in English: Maps of Time in the United Kingdom, Crossing the River in Canada and Khamsin: Memoirs and Poetry by a Native Israeli (Lynne Rienner Publishers) and The Fullness Thereof (Dryad Press) in the U.S.

Remarkably adept in translating from Hebrew into English, and English into Hebrew, Moshe translated Ephraim Sten’s 1111 Days in My Life Plus Four into English, while he and Barbara Goldberg have collaborated on a number of books from Dryad Press as editors and translators:

After the First Rain: Israeli Poems on War & Peace (editors)
The Fire Stays in Red by Ronnie Someck (translators)
The Fullness Thereof (translators)

With Giora Leshem, Dor and Goldberg also edited The Stones Remember: Native Israeli Poetry (The Word Works)

Moshe has translated into Hebrew numbers of books of selected poems by American poets, including:

Rober Bly, People Like Us (forthcoming, Keshev)
Rita Dove, Breakfast of Champions (Keshev)
Barbara Goldberg, Night Watch (Keshev)
Robert Hass, Human Wishes (Keshev)
Stanley Kunitz, Selected Poems (forthcoming, Hakibbutz Hameuchad)
William Matthews, Living With the Dead (Keshev)
Jean Nordhaus, The Porcelain Apes of Mendelssohn (Carmel)
Carl Sandburg, Prayers of Steel (Keshev)
Charles Simic, The World Does Not End (Keshev)
Myra Sklarew, Eating the White Earth (Tag)
Reed Whittemore, Season of Waiting (Keshev)
James Wright, Only in the Evening I Saw (Keshev)