Brod was the close friend and literary executor of Franz Kafka, whose works he published after Kafka's death despite Kafka's request that they be destroyed.

He published Kafka's novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927).

• In 1939, he fled Nazi-occupied Prague for Mandatory Palestine carrying Kafka's papers, and later worked as a dramaturge for the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv.

• A prolific author in his own right, he wrote the novel Tycho Brahe's Path to God (1915).

• After a long legal battle over Kafka's papers, Israel's Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that they belonged to the National Library of Israel.