Sana KRASIKOV wins the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

UKRAINE-born SANA KRASIKOV is the recipient of the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for new writers of Jewish literature, it was announced by the Jewish Book Council on March 24, 2009. (The Jewish Book Council is a not-for-profit organization devoted to the promotion of Jewish-interest literature.) She wins US$100,000 for her début short-story collection, One More Year (Spiegel & Grau, 2008/Random House, 2009). (The Sami Rohr Prize is the largest prize of its kind in the Jewish literary world, and one of the largest literary prizes in the world. In 2006, in celebration of Sami Rohr’s 80th birthday, his children and grandchildren inaugurated the Sami Rohr Prize to honour his lifelong love of Jewish literature. The Prize considers fiction and nonfiction in alternating years.)

Allen Hoffman, one of the judges, said that Krasikov’s characters are often alienated and confused, but her stories are always clear and precise, because she deeply understands her characters’ aspirations, fears, and stubborn passion for survival, and her elegant, revealing narratives imbue their fragile, vulnerable lives with an imposing dignity.


DALIA SOFER was also announced the recipient of the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award for her first novel, The Septembers of Shiraz (HarperCollins, 2007). She wins US$25,000 for a work that tells of the travails of one Jewish family in the period after the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Previous winners of the Sami Rohr Prize are TAMAR YELLIN, author of the first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher (Toby Press, 2005), and LUCETTE LAGNADO, author of a family memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (HarperCollins, 2007).