Israeli GPO photographer · Public domain

Born in Austro-Hungarian Galicia and later a longtime resident of Jerusalem, Agnon wrote in a Hebrew that mixed the modern language with rabbinic and biblical registers, work built around the friction between the traditional Jewish world of the Eastern European shtetl and the modern one that was displacing it. He shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature with the poet Nelly Sachs, becoming the first Hebrew-language writer to win it.