The writer and poet Yotam Reuveni passed away Israel today

The poet, writer and translator Yotam Reuveni passed away yesterday (Sunday) at the age of 71.

Reuveni is considered a pioneer in Hebrew poetry and literature, and his writing dealt, among other things, directly with the lives of homosexuals in Israel.

Reuveni was born in 1949 in Iasi, Romania, orphaned in 1957 by his mother, and in 1964 immigrated to Israel and lived with his family in Ashdod.

He changed his name and joined the Israeli press (Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth).

His first book, the novel "In favor of hallucinations", caused a sensation among the local literary community, as he fearlessly exposed the life of the gay community in the country.

The novel was introduced by Pinchas Sadeh, who wrote that it joins a great tradition of confessional literature.

Reuveni worked all his life on the fringes of literature, maintaining the image of the immigrant and writing about the experiences of immigration, the social exclusion that accompanies it and the difficulties involved in the encounter between culture and language. He won a cold shoulder from the mainstream for years, for being a fairly prolific writer and having published 16 novels and four books of poetry. In 2000, he founded Nimrod Publishing, in which he published, among other things, translations by the Romanian thinker and author Mircea Eliade. Among other things, Reuben has translated countless writers - Marcel Frost, Daniel Defoe, Emil Durkheim, Graham Green, Knut Hamson and many others.

In 2015, Reuben received a major refinement from the mainstream, when he was shortlisted for the Sapphire Prize for Literature for his novel "The Autobiography of Jean Riven" (Bus).

The judges' reasons for choosing to be included among the final nominees for the award state that his book is "a breathtaking confession, revealing in a poignant and unstoppable way the story of his migration from Romania to Israel as a young boy and his mode of existence as an immigrant, his life as a homosexual and his adult life. Different, the right word.

"After the poetry, prose, diaries and notes - Reuben leads his readers in crooked and invisible ways and shares with them a unique human experience."

That same year Reuben won the Landau Prize for the Arts in poetry.