Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel, Oct. 7

Nobel Prize winner, Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel will speak about his life and work on Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. in Illinois State University's Braden Auditorium.  "An Evening with Elie Wiesel," sponsored by the Sage Fund, is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow the presentation.  Wiesel will also hold an informal question and answer session that afternoon at 3:30 p.m. on the Main Floor of Milner Library.

Wiesel has worked on behalf of oppressed people for much of his adult life. His personal experience of the Holocaust has led him to use his talents as an author, teacher and storyteller to defend human rights and peace throughout the world.

Wiesel's efforts have earned him numerous honors including the United States Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor, an honorary Knighthood of the British Empire and the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

A devoted supporter of Israel, Wiesel has also defended the cause of Soviet Jews, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians, Argentina's "Disappeared," Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, South African apartheid victims, famine victims in Africa, and more recently the victims and prisoners in the former Yugoslavia.

Wiesel was born in the town of Sighet in Transylvania. He was 15 years old when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis. His mother and younger sister perished there; his two older sisters survived. Wiesel and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died before the camp was liberated in 1945.  After World War II, Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist.  His first book, Night, published in 1956 in Yiddish and in 1958 in French, has been translated into more than 30 languages and millions of copies have been sold.      

His more than fifty books have won numerous awards, including the Prix Médicis for A Beggar in Jerusalem, the Prix Livre Inter for The Testament and the Grand Prize for Literature from the City of Paris for The Fifth Son. The first volume of Wiesel's memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in 1995. The second volume, And the Sea is Never Full, followed in1999. His latest novel, Un désir fou de danser, published in France in 2006, is soon to be published in English.

Three months after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Marion and Elie Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Its mission is to advance the cause of human rights and peace throughout the world by creating a new forum for the discussion of urgent ethical issues confronting humankind.

Elie Wiesel has served as the distinguished professor of Judaic studies at the City University of New York and the Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in the Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University. Since 1976, he has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University where he also holds the title of university professor. He is a member of the faculty in the department of religion as well as the department of philosophy.