The award-winning Israeli writer has died aged 74

Israeli author Meir Shalev was born on 29 July 1948, just after the foundation of the State of Israel. He was part of the generation that includes historian Benny Morris, fellow writer David Grossman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He was born to a family of wordsmiths in the farming community of Nahalal in northern Israel, the country's first moshav (settlement). He was the son of poet Yitzhak Shalev and his wife Batya, and the writer Zeruya Shalev is his cousin. The family later moved to Jerusalem. He fought in the Six Day War when he was only 18 and was later wounded in a friendly fire incident.

Some of Shalev’s best-known fiction is set in the Yishuv. His debut novel, The Blue Mountain, about pioneers in the Jezreel Valley, was published in 1988. It was the first of eight novels. The follow-up, Esau (1991), is another historic novel, which tells the story of a baker’s family from the beginning of the 20th century up to the 1970s. It was later made into a film starring Harvey Keitel.

His third, The Loves of Judith (1994, also published as The Four Meals), is about a woman who comes to a rural village between the wars, mourning the disappearance of her daughter, and the three men who fall in love with her. The power of women to mould the lives of men is a recurring theme in Shalev’s writing, perhaps most obviously in His House in the Desert (1998), the story of 52-year-old Rafael Meyer, his grandmother, ex-wife and two aunts. His most acclaimed novel was 2006's A Pigeon and a Boy, for which he was awarded the Brenner Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. His books were translated in 26 languages.

Shalev also wrote several works of non-fiction, including the marvellously named My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner (2011), almost 20 children's books, and a weekly column in the weekend edition of Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He also hosted and produced a number of radio and television programmes.

When Shalev died from cancer on 11 April, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said: "Israel has lost one of its greatest storytellers, he made us love the Hebrew language, the Hebrew Bible and ourselves, the Jewish People."

By David Herman

Header photo by Stephan Röhl