Moshe Sakal was born in Tel Aviv into a Jewish-Arab family with roots in Damascus and Cairo. He lived in Paris before settling in Berlin in 2019, where he co-founded Altneuland Press — the first Hebrew literary publisher established outside Israel since 1948.

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He is the author of six Hebrew novels, including The Diamond Setter (Other Press, translated by Jessica Cohen) and Yolanda (Stock, Paris). A new edition of The Diamond Setter will be published by Other Press / Penguin Random House in September 2026. His fiction explores exile, diaspora, queer identity, and the shared Arab-Jewish world before 1948.

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Sakal is a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and has also written for Le Monde, Libération, and Haaretz. His essay series "Mensch und Maschine" — nineteen conversations with an artificial intelligence on memory, the body, and what it means to be human — was published in the FAZ throughout 2025.

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A two-time Sapir Prize nominee, Eshkol Prize winner, Fulbright Scholar, and Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa, Sakal received the Berlin Senate's Literature Grant in 2021.​

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“Maybe We Can Never Go Back”: An Interview with Moshe Sakal in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Podcast listening: The Old/New Middle East,  The Tel Aviv Review.