Book in praise of older women gets Israel's top prize
Esther Peled, a female author who defies convention, is awarded Israel’s most prestigious literary prize with the book that describes a woman’s journey on her way to a “room of her own.”
Esther Peled is not like other Israeli authors. First of all, she is a woman. While the Israeli literary scene has its fair share of prominent and prolific female authors, the heavyweights of this industry — David Grossman, Etgar Keret, A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz — are undeniably male.
But for Peled, who last month won the Sapir Prize for Literature, Israel’s highest literary honor, gender just scratches the surface of her refusal to follow convention. “Widely Open Underneath,” Peled’s collection of linked short stories that stunned the Israeli literary community by triumphing as this year’s dark-horse candidate for the honor, traces the life and loneliness of a middle-aged woman, told over the course of 34 short stories that together build a complete puzzle of her emotional and romantic life.
“Widely Open Underneath” flies in the face of everything readers expect commercially successful literature to be: It centers on a female heroine, crafted by a female author. It delves into the sexual desires of an older woman without a trace of shame or inhibition. Perhaps most radically, it is a self-published work, emerging on the Israeli market without the blessing or guidance of a traditional publishing house and becoming the first ever such work to claim the Sapir Prize.
“The discourse this [book] might generate is much more deep and meaningful than the discourse that is related to prizes. It’s a significant milestone in current Hebrew literature,” Neta Halperin, a prominent literary critic in Israel, told Al-Monitor.
