Shimon Adaf was born in Sderot, Israel, and now lives in Holon. A poet, novelist and musician, Adaf worked for several years as a literary editor at Keter Publishing House, and has also been a writer-in-residence at Iowa University. He leads the creative writing program and lectures on Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Adaf received the Yehuda Amichai prize for Hebrew poetry (2009) for the collection Aviva-No, translated by Yael Segalovitz; the Sapir Prize (2013) for the novel Mox Nox, which won the 2020 Jewish National Book Award for new Israeli fiction for the translation by Philip Simpson; and the Newman Prize for Hebrew Literature (2017). Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator born in Tel Aviv and based in New York. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin's Press, Akashic, Syracuse University, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Yardenne's writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Literary Hub, Blunderbuss, Apogee, The Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is a regular contributor to Ploughshares.
Shimon Adaf is my literary hero, a fearless explorer with the endless curiosity of a child and the skill of an Old Master, combined to unleash strange and wonderful masterpieces on the world. In his Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured. --Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone