Meir Shalev

Bestselling Israeli Novelist & Writer
Columnist for Yediot Ahronot

“Meir Shalev is a master story teller whose magic realism is similar to the art of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Israel’s most celebrated novelist, Meir Shalev was born in 1948 in Nahalal, Israel’s first moshav. He is a bestselling author in Israel, Holland, and Germany; and he has been translated into more than twenty languages. Now Shalev is making his impact felt on the American literary scene. His books include A Pigeon and a Boy, Fontanelle, Alone In the Desert, But A Few Days, and Esau. Russian Romance (The Blue Mountain) is one of the top five bestsellers in Israeli publishing history. Shalev’s writing is often compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his ability to “create worlds inhabited by the richness of invention and obsessiveness of dreams...He delivers both startling imagery and passionate, original characters whose destinies we follow through love, loss, laughter and death” (The New York Times Book Review).

Shalev is also the author of Beginnings: First Times in the Bible, a nonfiction book of essays about the bible, forthcoming by Doubleday in 2011. With a secular point of view Shalev follows the heroes and heroines of the old Testament, finding the first love ever mentioned in the text, the first kiss, first laugh and the first hate. Shalev finds who dreamt the first dream, who was the first king, first prophet and first spy ever mentioned. In The Beginning is Shalev's second book about the bible. His previous book, The Bible Now ("Tanach Achshav"), was published in 1985. Also forthcoming in 2011 are My Russian Grandmother and her American Vacuum Cleaner and Blue Mountain. 

Shalev is the recipient of the Juliet Club Prize (Italy); The Prime Minister's Prize (Israel); The Chiavari (Italy); The Entholomogical Prize (Israel); The Wizo Prize in France, Israel and Italy; and The Brenner Prize of 2006—the highest Israeli literary recognition awarded for his novel, A Pigeon and a Boy, published in the US by Random House in 2007. He studied Psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and produced and hosted several radio and television programs. He has written twelve children’s books, as well as four collections of essays. Meir Shalev is also a columnist with the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot. He lives in Jerusalem and in the north of Israel with his wife and children, where he is a motorcycle and jeep enthusiast.

About A PIGEON AND A BOY (2007)
Tour guide Yair Mendelson tells about his surprising conception and birth; about his mother, who gave him a sum of money allowing him to build a new home and leave his wife; and about the woman contractor who renovates his house and becomes his lover. Concurrently, he unravels a wondrous story of love that evolves between two handlers of homing pigeons that blossoms in the early 40s and lasts until Israel’s War of Independence, from the pigeon that carries the first love letter between the two fourteen year olds to the pigeon that alights from the midst of the battle of Jerusalem, carrying the final letter, with it's most unusual content that is unparalleled in the history of homing pigeons and in the annals of literature. A Pigeon And A Boy, Shalev’s sixth novel, is a captivating and moving story of a boy and his home, a nest and a girl, a pigeon and a baby. A tale of wandering passion and the return home—whether by humans or winged creatures.