Reading List · International literature
The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society is a literary award for writers whose work deals with human freedom in society. It is presented by the Jerusalem International Book Forum, formerly the Jerusalem International Book Fair, and is usually awarded every two years. The first laureate was the British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1963. Octavio Paz, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa all received it before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.
By Lisanne Swart · 31 laureates since 1963 · Usually biennial · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 28 October 2026
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Quick answer
The Jerusalem Prize is a literary award, usually given every two years by the Jerusalem International Book Forum, to a writer whose work expresses and promotes the freedom of the individual in society. The latest laureate is Michel Houellebecq, who received it in 2025.
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top lists every recipient, all 32 of them. The latest fifteen have their own entry further down, oldest first; the titles in the timeline that you can click are those.
Under each writer is a line of plain fact about the book or its author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
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Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel, published in Spanish in 2000, depicts the 1961 assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and its aftermath. Alongside the conspirators and Trujillo, it follows Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer who returns in 1996 to confront her father.
Adapted as a 2005 film directed by Luis Llosa, starring Isabella Rossellini.
Jorge Semprún’s first book, Le grand voyage (1963), is a fictionalised account of his deportation to Buchenwald. It follows the train journey to the camp, with flashbacks to the narrator’s French Resistance activity and glimpses of camp life and liberation.
Won the Prix Formentor and the Prix littéraire de la Résistance.
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies at a college in the Midwestern town of Blacksmith. He and his large blended family become preoccupied with the fear of death.
Won the US National Book Award for Fiction; filmed in 2022 by Noah Baumbach.
Susan Sontag’s 1999 novel is based on the life of the Polish actress Helena Modjeska, renamed Maryna Zalewska. It follows her arrival in California in 1876 and her rise to stardom on the American stage.
Won the US National Book Award for Fiction.
Arthur Miller’s play, first staged on Broadway in 1949, is set in late-1940s Brooklyn. It follows Willy Loman, an ageing travelling salesman, as he drifts between memory and the present while his relationship with his sons falls apart.
Won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play.
First published in Portuguese in 1979 as Os Cus de Judas, the novel is narrated by an army doctor who served in Angola during the Portuguese Colonial War. He addresses his account of the war to a listener.
Lobo Antunes received the Camões Prize in 2007.
Leszek Kołakowski’s three-volume study, first published in Polish in Paris in 1976, traces the origins, growth and breakdown of Marxism and its philosophical schools. He wrote it in Poland, where it could not then be published.
The English translation appeared in 1978 as The Founders, The Golden Age and The Breakdown.
Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel is narrated by Toru Watanabe, who looks back on his student years in late-1960s Tokyo. After the death of his best friend, Kizuki, he becomes involved with two very different women, Naoko and Midori.
Adapted as a 2010 film directed by Tran Anh Hung.
Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel opens in England in 1935, when thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis falsely accuses Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, of a crime. The accusation sends him to prison and shapes the lives of everyone involved through the war years.
Shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize; filmed in 2007 by Joe Wright.
Antonio Muñoz Molina’s 1987 novel, El invierno en Lisboa, follows Santiago Biralbo, a jazz pianist in San Sebastián, who falls for Lucrecia, the wife of an American art dealer. When her husband takes her to Berlin, Biralbo tries to find her again.
Won Spain’s National Narrative Prize.
Ismail Kadare’s 1963 novel follows an Italian general and an Italian army priest who travel to Albania some twenty years after the Second World War. Their task is to find the bodies of Italian soldiers killed there and return them home for burial.
Its 1970 French translation brought Kadare his first major international success.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume series of autobiographical novels, published in Norwegian from 2009 to 2011, casts the author as protagonist and his real relatives as characters. It records the ordinary details and humiliations of his life.
Book One won Norway’s Brage Prize in 2009.
Joyce Carol Oates’s 1969 novel begins in a Midwestern canal city in the 1930s and later moves to Detroit. It follows Loretta Botsford and her children, Jules, Maureen and Betty, through decades of poverty, crime and violence.
Won the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction.
Julian Barnes’s 2011 novel is narrated by Tony Webster, a retired man in England who looks back on his school days in the 1960s and his friendship with the precocious Adrian Finn. Events from the past later return to unsettle him.
Won the 2011 Booker Prize; filmed in 2017 by Ritesh Batra.
Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel imagines a near-future France in which a Muslim party, supported by the Socialists, wins the 2022 presidential election. The narrator, François, is a middle-aged literature professor in Paris who specialises in Huysmans.
Published on 7 January 2015, the same day as the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
The Jerusalem International Book Fair was founded in 1963 by Asher Weill and has been held every second year. The Jerusalem Prize was created as an integral part of the fair, and its first laureate that year was Bertrand Russell. Laureates usually deliver an address when they accept the award.
The fair was held at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center (Binyanei Ha’Uma) until 2015, after which it spread across cultural venues in the city. In 2019 it was renamed the Jerusalem International Book Forum, which continues to present the prize.
Joyce Carol Oates received the prize in 2019 and Julian Barnes in 2021; his prize was confirmed at the 2022 forum, after COVID-19 had disrupted the schedule. In March 2024 the forum’s director, Sharon Katz, announced that the next edition would be postponed from May 2024 to 2025 because of the situation in Israel and the region. No prize was awarded in 2023, the first gap in its history.
In 2025 a jury chaired by Professor Gur Zak, with Dr Arik Glasner and Bilha Ben-Eliyahu, unanimously chose the French novelist, poet, essayist and filmmaker Michel Houellebecq. The jury described him as a “distinguished, brave and moral voice in current literature”, and the prize was awarded in May 2025.
It is a literary award for a writer whose work expresses and promotes the freedom of the individual in society. It is presented by the Jerusalem International Book Forum, usually every two years.
Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist, poet and essayist, who received it in May 2025.
No. No prize was given in 2023, the first such gap since 1963. The forum planned for May 2024 was postponed to 2025.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, in 1963.
Usually every two years, at the Jerusalem International Book Forum.
Octavio Paz, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa received the Jerusalem Prize before the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Wikipedia gives the value as US$10,000.
Don DeLillo (1999), Susan Sontag (2001), Arthur Miller (2003) and Joyce Carol Oates (2019).
Recipient list last verified 28 October 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
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