The Icon Festival proudly cultivates and promotes Israeli art, seeking to bring about direct interaction between Israeli artists and their audience. The finest Israeli authors and artists are invited to Icon every year, enabling the audience to encounter the ideas and the people through lectures, panels, workshops and discussions.

Icon 2006 will feature famous Israeli authors and editors who have acted or touched upon the science fiction and fantasy genres. The event dedicated to Israeli authors will include such figures as Ofir Touche-Gafla, author of the best-selling End’s World and winner of the 2005 Geffen Award; Yoav Avni, author of Three Things for a Lonely Island; Hagar Yanai, author of the young-adult fantasy novel The Whale of Babylon; Shimon Adef, former editor at the Keter publishing house; and Vered Tochterman, editor of the Dreams in Aspamia magazine. The host of the event will be Nir Yaniv, whose story collection, One Hell of a Writer, was published this year.