Sayed Kashua
Creator of the series and acclaimed Arab-Israeli writer, Sayed Kashua draws from his own experience as a journalist in Jerusalem.
Kashua was born in Tira (about 18 miles north of Tel Aviv) and studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Interestingly, Kashua often writes in Hebrew, as opposed to his mother tongue, Arabic. His novels Dancing Arabs (2002), Let It Be Morning (2006), and Second Person Singular (2010) have won numerous international prizes and have been translated into several languages.
Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life, a collection of interrelated essays on life in modern Jerusalem written between 2006 and 2014, includes his humorous columns from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, in which he anecdotally addresses the experience of being Arab in Israel.
He also used humor and satire to explore ignorance and prejudice on both sides of the Israeli-Arab ethnic divide as the screenwriter of two Israeli hit television series, the semi-autobiographical The Writer and Arab Labor. In 2010, Kashua was given the Freedom of Expression Award at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Although he devoted much of his adult life trying to tell Israelis (and others) the Palestinian story, he ultimately found the task fruitless and the political situation untenable. Kashua moved to the United States with his wife and children in 2014 as a fellow of the Israel Studies Project at the University of Illinois, then became a visiting professor there.
He is currently a graduate student in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also recently served as a Hebrew instructor.
An English translation of his fourth and latest novel Track Changes came out in January 2020. It follows an Arab Israeli man as he deals with his memories, his past and his cultural identity.