Amir Or in Prague

Our next and current resident is the Israeli poet Amir Or. You can come to hear him read and talk about his work on the 17th of October in The Museum of Czech Literature in Malá vila. The evening will be hosted by the editor of Radio Praha David Vaughan and the translations into Czech recited by the actor Kajetán Písařovic. We look forward to see you there at 19:00. Here you can access also the event of facebook : https://www.facebook.com/…95894344446/

Amir Or as an author of eleven poetry books, two novels and eleven translations into Hebrew, has given readings and lectures worldwide, and taught creative writing in Israel, USA, Czech Republic, Austria, UK and Japan. He debuted in 1987 with I Look Through The Monkeys´ Eyes (Ani Mabbid Me´einei Haqqofim).

His fictional epic novel The Song of Tahira (Shir Tahira) was published 2001 and a novel The Kingdom (Hammamlacha) in 2015. From the range of collections of poems let´s mention So! (Kacha), Day (Yom), Loot (Shalal), selected poems 1977–2013, or so far the last Wings (Knafayim). He translates the wide range of works into Hebrew, eg. Stories From The Mahabharata (Sippurim min Ha-Mahabharata), To a Woman by Shuntaro Tanikawa (Le'isha) or When the Salamanders Sing by Aurelia Lassaque (Shirat Hassalamandra).

He founded Helicon Poetry (in 1990) and the Arabic-Hebrew Helicon Poetry School (in 1993). Helicon is a poetry journal, a poetry press, a training centre for young poets, a producer of poetry performances, an initiator of interactive ventures between poetry and the other arts, a promoter of communication and sharing among poets writing in the various languages of Israel – Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian and more – and an importer of poetry from the world into Israel and an exporter of Israeli poetry to the world. Amir Or is active also in the editorial work – as an editor of Helicon´s journal and poetry books, and a national coordinator for the U.N. “Poets for Peace”.

Amir Or has been awarded national Israeli awards such as Bernstein Award, Prime Minister´s Prize for Writers, Culture Minister´s Honorary Translation Prize as well as international awards such as the Pleiades tribute, Struga (2000), Fulbright Award for Writers, Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša´ International Award, or World Through Poetry Award from Montreal.