You­val Shi­moni was born in Jerusalem in 1955. He stud­ied cin­e­ma at Tel Aviv Uni­ver­si­ty and first began pub­lish­ing in 1990. Shi­moni is a senior edi­tor at the Am Oved Pub­lish­ing House and has taught cre­ative writ­ing at Tel Aviv, Haifa and Bar Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty. He has been award­ed the Bern­stein Prize (2001), the Prime Min­is­ter’s Prize (2005) and both the Bren­ner Prize (2015) and the New­man Prize (2016) for The Salt Line. In 2018 a two-day inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence on his works was held at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge.