Bernstein won the award for her book "Let's go to the amusement park tomorrow" • "Describes first-person the plight of a single mother"

• Ilana Bernstein. Winner of the Sapphire Literature Prize for 2019

  Photo: 

  Sivan Faraj

Ilana Bernstein is the winner of the 2019 Sapphire Literature Sapir Prize - this is what the Judiciary Committee led by Esther Dominicini announced today. Bernstein, who won the award for her book "Tomorrow We Will Go to the Amusement Park" (published by Zamora Pavilion), received a cash prize of NIS 150,000, and her book will be translated into Arabic and another language of her choice. The other members of the short list who were nominated for the award - Yaara Shachuri, Eilat Shamir, Dror Mishani and Michal Ben-Naftali, each won NIS 40,000.   

Arnon Itiel won the first prize for his book "Efrat Damascus Efrat", which was also published by Zamora Pavilion. He will receive a prize of NIS 40,000 for winning.  

The ceremony, which was scheduled to take place in March this year, was postponed due to the outbreak of the Corona virus, and was held without a crowd. This year's judges, alongside Dominicini, included Professor Rachel Elbeck Gadron, an interdisciplinary scholar of literature; Dr. Ronnie Halpern, lecturer in the Department of Literature and the Program of Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University; Anat Sargusti, journalist and social activist; Aina Ardell, poet and teacher of literature; Raphael Bello, director and screenwriter;

Avigdor Yitzhaki, chairman of the Lottery, said in a press release that "It was precisely in the shadow of the Corona crisis that it was important for us to hold the Sapphire Prize ceremony to express the enormous appreciation we feel for the Israeli artists, artists and writers. I hope that next year we will be able to hold the ceremony when the hall is full and we will celebrate with the winners and their families the fruits of Israeli creativity. "  

Born in 1957, Bernstein is a veteran writer and playwright whose dozen of her books have been published for three decades. She frequently engages in Israeli parenting and family, under a cloud of disguised violence and national historical charges. Her first novel, "That Her Cover was Tortured," was published in 1991.     

In selecting her book as a winner in 2019, the judges wrote that "he describes at first sight the distress of a single mother's life to two young children, in a materially difficult mental and material reality. The intensive narrative offers a fascinating possibility to re-examine the concept of motherhood through experiences of abandonment, vulnerability, loneliness. Bernstein's language reaches the extremes of mental states and looks with a sober, sometimes circus, gaze on the distress of daily existence. It is an important social document and at the same time a show of exposed, direct and powerful writing. A break, as life breaks out. "    

On the grounds of choosing Ethiel's book as the premiere winner, the judges wrote that "a harrowing and poignant dystopia, beginning in Efrat, among a group of hard-working, unique, violent, youths whose hero joins them as their protectors of abuse, and continues to mobilize the area to mobilize The whole, and in fact anarchically managed by secret capital and power groups. "