Nir Baram
Nir Baram is considered one of the most talented Israeliwriters of his generation. He was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. Baram studied literature at the University of Tel Aviv, has worked as a journalist for newspaper Haaretz, as an editor at publishing house Am Oved, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians.
Nir Baram began publishing fiction when he was twenty-two, and is the author of five novels, including The Remaker of Dreams, Good People and World Shadow. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Literature.
Good People was published in English by Text Publishing (translated by Jeffrey Green). In 2017, they will as well publish Nir Baram’s reportage Walking the Green Line. Accompanied by a photographer and a desire to hear the voices that are not normally featured in the media, Nir Baram journeyed extensively around Israel and the West Bank during the past year. Walking the Green Line paints a complex political picture, as Baram talks to settlers and kibbutzniks, politicians and activists, ex-prisoners and soldiers, those born after the occupation began and those who remember Israel before June 1967. Baram meets a variety of people over the course of this journey: Palestinian-Israeli citizens trapped behind the Separation Wall in Jerusalem, a real no man’s land where neighborhoods have no municipal rule; children living in Kibbutz Nirim who experienced the war in Gaza, the rockets raining down on their homes; young Palestinians, the close friends of the Palestinian boy who was murdered by Jews. He experiences things like being held-up at occupation checkpoints with Palestinian laborers; meeting ex-prisoners from Hamas who have started a Hebrew language school in Ramallah, and ex-prisoners from Fatah who spent years detained in Israeli jails and who are now promoting a new peace initiative. He gets into a secluded settlers’ stronghold in the West Bank, and near Nablus he comes across two Palestinian boys tied up by the side of the road after allegedly trying to stab Israeli soldiers, only to find that the truth is something entirely different.
More info on http://nirbaram.com/.
PRAISE FOR GOOD PEOPLE
‘Quite possibly, Dostoyevsky would write like this if he lived in Israel today.' - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘Written with great talent, momentum and ingenuity...it expands the borders of literature to reveal new landscapes.' - Amos Oz
‘One of the most intriguing writers in Israeli literature today.' - Haaretz
‘Good People rewards the reader's patience while mining a tragic sense of irony that extends all the way to its title.' - Big Issue
‘Good People is a richly textured panorama of German and Russian life...This ample novel lives most memorably through Baram's vignettes of people, dwellings, cities, landscapes and the like that seem to lie, at times, at the periphery of its central concerns.' - Age/Sydney Morning Herald
‘A groundbreaker...Riveting reading.'Qantas Magazine ‘Good People is the tale of ordinary, middle-class lives sucked into a moral maelstrom. It is compulsive and profoundly disturbing.' - Sunday Star Times
‘A taut, compelling novel that's hard to put down...By creating an imaginary situation, Baram also refreshes the discourse away from clichés and stereotypes. It shows how people who were indifferent to politics can be sucked into its grasp.' - ANZ LitLovers
‘Precise and evocative, Good People is a riveting glimpse into a different place and a different time.' - Canberra Weekly
‘Astonishingly powerful...[A] compelling, important story.' - New Zealand Listener