The cause was pancreatic cancer, a representative of the Deborah Harris literary agency confirmed.

Shalev was born in 1948, the year Israel became a state, and emerged as one of the nation’s most prominent men of letters, compared at times to A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Aharon Appelfeld and David Grossman.

Although Shalev associated himself with the Israeli left, he stood out from many literary figures in Israel by keeping his distance from politics and in particular from the seemingly intractable conflict with the country’s Arab neighbors.

Shalev regarded peace talks and parliamentary coalitions as fine subject matter for newspaper columns, including the one he wrote for three decades for the centrist Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. But he saw literature – or at least the literature he wished to write – as a world apart.

“I am suspicious of political literature,” Shalev once told the Jerusalem Post. “In many cases it doesn’t seem honest to me and some scenes seem forced.”

After military service during the Six-Day War of 1967, Shalev spent the early years of his career in radio and television, including hosting a TV talk show. But his father had been a noted Israeli poet, and Shalev was ultimately drawn back into the literary world in which he was raised.

He wrote several children’s books, including the popular “Michael and the Monster of Jerusalem,” before his first novel, “The Blue Mountain,” was published in 1988, the year he turned 40. The book was animated by stories his grandmother had told him about her life on a moshav, or cooperating farming community, in the decades before Israel became an independent state.

Shalev “has departed from the compelling present and written a historical novel about the pioneering tradition that led to the birth of Israel,” journalist Herbert Mitgang wrote in a New York Times review. The villagers who populated the book, Mitgang observed, had “gladly traded one hardship for another: the fear of living almost as aliens in their native Russia for an alien wilderness in Palestine.”

With its epic qualities and flashes of mysticism, Shalev’s work attracted frequent comparisons to the magical realism of Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. (Shalev, for his part, cited writers including Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov and Sholem Aleichem as his greater literary influences.)

He had another bestseller with “A Pigeon and a Boy” (2006), a novel that received the Brenner Prize, the most prestigious Israeli literary recognition. The book intermingles the midlife crisis of an Israeli tour guide with a poignant romance between two homing-pigeon handlers during the 1948 Israeli war of independence.

“All the weapons fell silent for a moment,” reads an early passage in the book. “Ours and theirs. Not a single gun fired, no grenades exploded, and all the mouths stopped shouting. It was so quiet that we heard the bird’s wings beating the air. For a single moment every eye and every finger was following that bird as she did what we all wanted to do: make her way home.”

Shalev turned to memoir in the volume “My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner,” published in Hebrew in 2009, and widely read in Israel and beyond. The title referred to a gift that the matriarch of his family had received from a wealthy American relation, and which, to the amusement of all who knew her, she put away, lest it be dirtied by the dust of the as-yet-untamed land that was to become Israel.

Meir Shalev was born on July 29, 1948, in Nahalal, Israel’s first moshav, located in the northern Jezreel Valley. To his great unhappiness, he spent much of his upbringing in Jerusalem – “a fanatical city, a difficult city, a bad city,” he said. “Its ruins are more important than its homes, and its dead are more important than its living residents.” He much preferred the Jezreel Valley and would later return there to live.

Shalev’s family included a number of writers and intellectuals in addition to his father. His mother was a teacher. He credited both his parents with challenging him in his reading but recalled reacting against his father’s political conservatism from an early age.

“He wrote a lot of political poetry,” Shalev told Moment magazine. “When I was 12 or 13, I began to argue with him about this. I told him that his lyrical poetry was much better than his political poetry. I like poetry that is about memory, longing and love – not politics. Similarly, when I read the Bible, the character of David as a father to his son is much more interesting to me than as a king to his people.”

During Shalev’s military service, he was badly wounded by friendly fire, an experience that turned him increasingly to the left. He studied psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem before embarking on his radio and television career.

Shalev wrote more than a dozen works of children’s literature in all, among them the gently kidding “My Father Always Embarrasses Me,” drawn from his own experience as a father. His novels included “Esau,” “Four Meals,” “The Loves of Judith” and “Two She-Bears.”

He wrote several nonfiction books on the Bible, among them “Beginnings: Reflections on Firsts in the Bible.” He described himself as a secular person and quipped that he saw the Old Testament as a sort of Jewish family novel. “After all,” he told the German publication Die Welt, “only 400 generations separate me from Abraham.”

Shalev and his wife, Rina, were once divorced and remarried. Besides his wife, survivors include their children, Zohar and Michael; a brother; and two grandchildren.

In his newspaper columns, Shalev wrote extensively about Israeli current affairs, advocating a two-state solution for Palestinian conflict and often bemoaning the state of Israeli politics. “Israel and I were born in the same year,” he observed several years ago, his pessimism tempered by wry humor, “but I look much better!”