Yehuda Amichai - Awards and Honours

Awards and Honours

• 1957 – Shlonsky Prize
• 1969 – Brenner Prize
• 1976 – Bialik Prize for literature (co-recipient with essayist Yeshurun Keshet)
• 1981 – Wurzburg's Prize for Culture (Germany)
• 1982 – Israel Prize for Hebrew poetry. The prize citation read, in part: "Through his synthesis of the poetic with the everyday, Yehuda Amichai effected a revolutionary change in both the subject matter and the language of poetry."
• 1986 – Agnon Prize
• 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France)
• 1994 – Literary Lion Award (New York)
• 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival
• 1996 – Norwegian Bjornson Poetry Award

Amichai received an Honor Citation from Assiut University, Egypt, and numerous honorary doctorates. He became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1986), and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991). His work is included in the "100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature" (2001), and in a great number of international anthologies such as:"Poems for the Millennium"by J.Rothenberg and P.Joris ,and "100great Poems of the 20th Century" by Mark Strand. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, but never won. Tufts University English professor Jonathan Wilson wrote, "He should have won the Nobel Prize in any of the last 20 years, but he knew that as far as the Scandinavian judges were concerned, and whatever his personal politics, which were indubitably on the dovish side, he came from the wrong side of the stockade."

In 2005, Amichai was voted the 82nd-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.