Yaara Shehori

- Israel -

Yaara Shehori (b. 1977, Tel Aviv) is an acclaimed Israeli poet, novelist, and editor. She holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Literature from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and serves as Editor of Hebrew Literature at Keter Publishing House. She is the author of seven books of poetry, fiction, and children’s literature, including the poetry collections Our Trembling Times (Pardes, 2024) and Tooth, Wing, thumb (Am Oved, 2010), and the novels The Liars’ Hour (2022), The Roaring Twenties (2019), Aquarium (2016), and Years of Milk (2013), the latter published in English by FSG. She teaches literature and creative writing, and is the recipient of the Agnon Prize (2022), the Bernstein Prize (2017), and the Prime Minister’s Prize (2015). In 2017 she received a Fulbright Fellowship to participate in the International Writing Program in Iowa, USA. She lives and works in Tel Aviv.

 

 


Yaara Shehori is an Israeli poet and novelist who writes with a unique poetic sensitivity. Her body of poetic work is deeply engaged with the Hebrew literary tradition, a conversation conducted both openly and in subtle threads, while establishing a voice of its own that is crisp, musical, and intimate. Her poetry explores the threads that tie together mother and daughter, life and death, love and its attendant pain, and the experience of living under the shadow of war and rupture.

 

Poet Shachar-Mario Mordechai has observed that “Shehori writes from a place where she masters the poetic tension suspended between the blow and the pain. She holds within it love, life, and above all, the effort (and ability) to carry this time that is almost unbearable.”

 

As a writer of both poetry and prose, Shehori creates connections between these forms. Yet it is in her poetry, beginning with her debut collection Tooth, Wing, thumb (אצבע, שן, כנף, 2010), and continuing through works published in leading literary magazines, culminating in Our Trembling Times (הזמנים הרועדים שלנו  2024) that her singular voice emerges fully.

 

Literary scholar Reut Ben Yaakov has written that the speaker of Shehori’s poetry   does not seek easy comfort, nor is she satisfied merely with describing pain. Instead, she uses pain as a delicate material upon which she draws a map of life. The images that populate her poems, at once wounds and symbols, personal relics and mythical echoes, accompany both poet and reader across landscapes where time and history intertwine with intimacy and loss.

 

Poet and editor Navit Barel describes Shehori’s work as “poetry that can briefly draw the future closer, poetry that allows a glance across the timeline.” In these poems, the speaker often turns to a daughter, a mother, a partner, or herself; a searching, incisive voice that finds words and images not merely to draw the gaze away from the abyss, but to invite its revelation.

 

It is significant that Our Trembling Times was published after October 7, 2023, and in the midst of the bleeding war in Gaza. The pain within these poems is not confined to borders or politics; it returns to a deeply human, distinctly feminine perspective. Critic Nadavi Noked has noted that when Shehori herself asked in October 2023, “What poems can be written here except for laments?”, the answer came within the pages of her book: a poetry that does not settle for mourning destruction and absence, but also gestures toward a future, a horizon that often appears stripped of optimism but nonetheless demands witness and attention.

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. Prayer / תפילה

  2. The Old Lives / החיים הישנים

  3. Gold / זהב

  4. Bathtub / אמבטיה

  5. Journal / יומן

  6. Love / אהבה