2025 Winner

Since 1963 the Jerusalem Prize is awarded biennially, as an integral part of the JIBF, to a writer whose work best expresses and promotes the idea of “freedom of the individual in society.” Some of the authors who were awarded the Jerusalem Prize later received Nobel Prize for Literature, among them – Bertrand Russell , Octavio Paz, V. S. Naipaul, Mario Vargas Llosa and J. M. Coetzee.

The 2025 Jerusalem Prize Winner:

French Author Michel Houellebecq

The Jerusalem Prize will be awarded this coming May (2025) to French Author Michel Houellebecq.

Michel Houellebecq, author, poet, essayist, and filmmaker, is the author of over a dozen books. He is the recipient of many awards, among them the Goncourt prize and the Prix Interallié award. This year he joins the honorable list of Jerusalem Prize laureates. The jury chose him unanimously.

The Jury’s Decision:

“Michel Houellebecq is undoubtedly one of the most significant and influential writers in the world today.

‘Houellebecq is a radical author who thinks fundamentally about the human condition. He possesses an ability that could be described as a “Moral Gift” – his work, besides the aesthetic values with which it is endowed, is driven by a burning sense of morality. At a time when the literary world retreats into identity politics, Houellebecq is not afraid to address the most foundational and essential aspects of human existence (aging, death, love, and sex) and dares to write about them in the most clear, incisive way.

“Alongside his rare abilities to generalize and simplify, Houellebecq is a writer with powerful imagination, which allows him both to envision alternative realities to our current reality and to clearly critique that current reality from the perspective of those alternatives.

“Houellebecq brought Schopenhauer’s 19th century pessimism into contemporary public discourse while simultaneously being keenly attuned to the possibility of human happiness. In fact, he has an utmost sensitivity for the possibility of human happiness, both individual and collective – utopian. In that sense, Houellebecq could be called a humanist writer.

“The question of individual liberty in modern society is a key theme that runs like a scarlet thread throughout his work. On the one hand, Houellebecq can be seen as a key critic of extreme liberalism, in which the individual, stripped of collective identities (nationality, religion, class, ideology, distinctive culture) finds himself, in the late 20th century and the early 21st century, fully isolated in a commercialized and competitive society. His criticism of extreme liberalism deserves consideration. On the other hand, the same criticism he voiced, especially during the first decade and a half of his work (when it was a minority position), was a shining example of an individual’s ability to turn against the dominant viewpoint in the society and the culture he lives in; and to the way in which the individual’s ability to analyze the society he lives in can free said individual from society’s dogmas and practices, and from there – to help free others.

“For being a distinguished, brave and moral voice in current literature, we award Michel Houellebecq the Jerusalem Prize for literature of 2025.”

The 2025 Jury:

• Prof. Gur Zak (chairman)
• Dr. Arik Glasner
• Ms. Bilha Ben-Eliyahu