AHARON APPELFELDis the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, includingThe Iron Tracks, Untilthe Dawn'sLight(both winners of the National Jewish Book Award),The Story of a Life(winner of the Prix Medicis tranger), andBadenheim 1939. Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award.Blooms of Darknesswon the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, he died in Israel in 2018.