Yoel Hoffmann (Hebrew: יואל הופמן; 23 June 1937[1] – 25 August 2023) was an Israeli Jewish contemporary author, editor, scholar and translator.
Held a title of a professor of Japanese poetry, Buddhism, and philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel and lived in Galilee.
[2] As a young man, Hoffmann left his home in Israel and traveled to Japan, where he spent two years living in a Zen monastery and studying Chinese and Japanese texts with monks.
Hoffmann did not begin writing fiction until in his forties, and though chronologically a member of the sixties "Generation of the State," his work is oft-described as being on the forefront of avant-garde Hebrew literature, with an influence of his Japanese studies discernible in his works.
He went on to write ten more books in Hebrew, seven of which have been translated into English and published by New Directions; these include Katschen and The Book of Joseph (1998), Bernhard (1998),[4] The Christ of Fish (1999), The Heart is Katmandu (2001), The Shunra and the Schmetterling (2004), Curriculum Vitae (2009), and Moods (2015).