Amalia Kahana-Carmon

Amalia Kahana-Carmon was born in 1926 in Ein Harod

Amalia Kahana-Carmon was born on 18 October 1926 in Kibbutz Ein Harod. Her father, Chaim Kahana, was among the founders of the kibbutz, and her mother, Sara Crispin, was born in Bulgaria and worked as a beekeeper and Hebrew teacher. The family moved to Tel Aviv, where she studied at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium.

During the War of Independence she served as a signals operator in the Negev Brigade of the Palmach. She sent the telegram announcing the capture of Eilat. She later studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and earned a master's degree in library science there in 1964.

She lived in London, where she married Arie Carmon in 1951, and later in Switzerland. Back in Israel, she worked as a librarian at Tel Aviv University and as a private English teacher, and led creative writing workshops.

Her fiction used a lyrical style and focused on the inner lives of individuals, often women, rather than national ideals. Critics did not place her in the Palmach Generation or the Generation of Statehood. She received the Israel Prize in 2000 and an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University in 2006, and died on 16 January 2019.