Israeli novelist Amos Oz has died of cancer at the age of 79, his daughter announced on Friday. “To those who love him, thank you,” Fania Oz-Salzberger tweeted. She described him as a “wonderful family man, an author and a man of peace and moderation”.
“He was surrounded by his lovers and knew it to the end. May his good legacy continue to amend the world,” added Oz-Salzberger.
Oz was born Amos Klausner on May 4, 1939 in Jerusalem. Some of his famous works include A Tale of Love and Darkness, Black Box, In the Land of Israel and Judas. In 2017, Judas was shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize.
He is the author of 18 books in Hebrew and hundreds of articles that were published in newspapers around the world. A Tale of Love and Darkness was adapted into a film. Much of his work, both fiction and non fiction, explored kibbutz life and picked apart his characters’ often complex relationships with Israel and modern politics. The kibbutz is an agricultural settlement unique to Israel.
Oz, who was a professor of literature at the Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, was a major proponent of the two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict. His support for the rights of Palestinians led to him being accused of being a traitor, which he claimed to wear “as a badge of honour”.
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