The Erasmus Prize 2022 has been awarded to the Israeli author David Grossman (68). The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation has announced this. King Willem-Alexander is patron of the foundation and will present the prize to Grossman.
Grossman is one of Israel’s best-known writers and has regularly spoken out for peace in the Middle East. According to the jury, his oeuvre and convictions fit in well with the theme of this year’s Erasmus Prize: ‘Connectors in a divided world.’
“Grossman fits this character like no other. In his work he wants to understand people from the inside, and to look at others with love beyond the boundaries of war and history”, the jury report states.
In 2006, Grossman, along with fellow writer Amos Oz, called on the Israeli government to end the war in Lebanon. Two days later, one of his sons was killed in the same war by an anti-tank missile. That experience became part of his book A woman on the run from a message, in which an Israeli mother loses her son at the front. He also wrote the book Falling out of time about the loss of his son.
Grossman has written some twenty novels, children’s books and collections of essays. In 2017 he won the Man Booker Prize for his book A horse enters the pub† Like Erasmus, the jury calls Grossman “a true humanist: he shows us man, naked and fallible, as divine as he is monstrous”.
