Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Shmuel Yosef Agnon was an Austro-Hungarian-born Israeli novelist, poet and short story writer, born in 1887 in Buczacz, Galicia and died in 1970, who became a central figure in modern Hebrew literature. He immigrated to Ottoman Palestine as a young man and later settled permanently in Jerusalem, writing fiction that explores the tension between traditional Jewish life and the modern world, often elegizing the fading Eastern European Jewish communities he had grown up among, in a distinctive style blending modern and rabbinic Hebrew. In 1966 he shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with the poet Nelly Sachs, recognized for what the citation called his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.