Amos Oz (; born Amos Klausner; 4 May 1939 – 28 December 2018) was an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, and intellectual. He was also a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. From 1967 onwards, Oz was a prominent advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He was the author of 40 books, including novels, short story collections, children's books, and essays, and his work has been published in 45 languages, more than that of any other Israeli writer. He was the recipient of many honours and awards, among them the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Legion of Honour of France, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature, the Heinrich Heine Prize, and the Franz Kafka Prize. Oz is regarded as one of "Israel's most prolific writers and respected intellectuals", as The New York Times worded it in an obituary. Biography Amos Klausner (later Oz) was born in 1939 in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, where he grew up at No. 18 Amos Street in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood. He was the only child of Fania (Mussman) and Yehuda Arieh Klausner, immigrants to Mandatory Palestine who had met while studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His father's family was from Lithuania, where they had been farmers, raising cattle and vegetables near Vilnius. His father studied history and literature in Vilnius (then part of Poland), and hoped to become a professor of comparative literature, but never gained headway in the academic world. He worked most of his life as a librarian at the Jewish National and University Library. Oz's mother grew up in Rivne (then part of Poland, now Ukraine). She was a highly sensitive and cultured daughter of a wealthy mill owner and his wife, and attended Charles University in Prague, where she studied history and philosophy. She had to abandon her studies when her father's business collapsed during the Great Depression. Oz's parents were multilingual (his father claimed he could read in 16 or 17 languages, while his mother spoke four or five languages, but could read in seven or eight) but neither was comfortable speaking in Hebrew, which was adopted as the official language of Israel. They spoke with each other in Russian or Polish, but the only language they allowed Oz to learn was Hebrew. Many of Oz's family members were right-wing Revisionist Zionists. His great-uncle Joseph