Poet
Yudit Shahar
Yudit Shahar
(Israel, 1959)
© Osnat Krasnanski
Biography
If Yudit Shahar may be compared to any other poet, it is to the American Philip Levine, who also writes about the working class – at work. Levine, who labored in Detroit’s car factories when he was young, has said: “I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life – or at least the part my work played in it – I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.”
Yudit Shahar, a special education teacher and the mother of two children, was born on the outskirts of the Hatikva neighborhood of Tel Aviv and lives in Petah Tikva – tikva meaning "hope" in Hebrew, "a very significant word in my life story", the poet says:
I studied history at Tel Aviv University and Special Education at the Kibbutz Teachers’ Seminary, and teach and work with marginalized populations in Israel society. Since the age of 7, I’ve been writing poetry. My poems, primarily of a social and political nature, have been published in journals, anthologies and in newspapers.
Her first book, It’s Me Speaking (Babel, 2009), was published when she was fifty; it won the Teva Poetry Prize, the David Levitan Prize and received support from the Casset Foundation. Her second, Every Street Has Its Own Madwoman (Keshev, 2013), won the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literature, and her third, Holy Illusion, will appear in 2021 from Afik Books.
© Lisa Katz
Links (in English)Translations by Aviya Kushner
with Hebrew originals
Ilanot Review
Exchanges
Waxwing
English only
Arkansas International
Catamaran
Tupelo Quarterly
Translation and commentary by Vivian Eden
Haaretz
Podcast (in English)
TLV
Videos (in Hebrew)
The poet on her lockdown
The poet reads for Festival Ashdod
A Guerilla Culture reading in Tel Aviv
Sponsored by POETRY PLACE
[updated Novermber 26, 2020]
Poems
Poems of Yudit Shahar
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère