Etgar Keret is an internationally acclaimed Israeli writer and filmmaker. Known for his short stories, rarely extending beyond three or four pages, Keret fuses the bizarre with the banal, and offers a window on a surreal world that is both dark and comic. Keret’s books have been published in over 45 languages and are bestsellers in Israel. He won the prestigious Sapir Prize and the Prime Minister’s Prize. More than 60 short movies and full features were based on his short stories.

Keret teaches creative writing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and directs the new MFA program at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Since 2021 he has been publishing a weekly Substack newsletter titled “Alphabet Soup”. His latest short-story collection “Autocorrect” was published in 2025.

Keret’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Paris Review, among many other publications. He is a regular contributor to This American Life. Keret received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature and the 2016 Charles Bronfman Prize, recognizing his work as inspiring Jewish Values and having global impact. Keret has also received the Book Publishers Associations Platinum Prize several times, the Chevalier medallion of France’s Order of Arts and Letters, and has been awarded the Ministry of Cultures Cinema Prize. Keret’s stories have inspired Polish architect Jakub Szczesny to build the narrowest house in the world (38 inches wide) in Warsaw.

As a filmmaker, Keret is the writer of several feature screenplays, including Skin Deep (1996), which won First Prize at several international film festivals and was awarded the Israeli Oscar. Wrist Cutters, featuring Tom Waits, was based on Keret’s story Kneller’s Happy Campers. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director along with his wife Shira Geffen, won the coveted Camera d’Or prize for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. The animated feature film $9.99, based on several of Keret’s stories, marries the tradition of Jewish self-flagellating humor with uncanny absurdity. In 2019, together with his wife Shira Geffen, Keret wrote and directed “The Middleman”, a mini-series for the French TV starring Mathieu Amalric.