Adina Hoffman
Headshot for Adina Hoffman
Agent: Miriam Altshuler
Personal Website

Adina Hoffman’s books include House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. A biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review, one of the top ten biographies of the year by Booklist and won the UK’s 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which was awarded the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year. In 2016, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published her Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, which the Los Angeles Times called “brave and often beautiful” and Haaretz described as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” Her critically acclaimed Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Prize for Biography and was named one of the best paperbacks of 2020 by the Sunday Times, which dubbed it “a revelation.” The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she was one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell prize. She lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.

 

  • BEN HECHT
    Yale University Press, 2019
  • TILL WE HAVE BUILT JERUSALEM
    Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016
  • SACRED TRASH
    Schocken/Nextbook, 2011
  • MY HAPPINESS BEARS NO RELATION TO HAPPINESS
    Yale University Press, 2009
  • HOUSE OF WINDOWS
    Steerforth Press, 2000