Ayelet Tsabari

Ayelet Tsabari was born in 1973 in Maḥaneh Yehudah

Tsabari was born on May 24, 1973, in the Mahane Yehuda neighborhood of Petah Tikva, into a large family of Yemeni descent. Her father, Haim Tsabari, wrote poems and worked as a lawyer, and he encouraged her reading and writing. He died of a heart attack shortly before she turned 10.

As a child she sent letters to the newspaper HaAretz Shelanu, which published them. From age 15 she worked as a journalist and wrote for Maariv LaNoar, At and Maariv.

She studied photography and film at Capilano University in Vancouver. She studied writing at Simon Fraser University and in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Guelph.

Her story collection The Best Place on Earth came out in Canada in 2013 and won the Sami Rohr Prize and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Her memoir in essays, The Art of Leaving, came out in 2019 and won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Memoir. Her novel Songs for the Brokenhearted, published in 2024, won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.

She writes mainly in English and teaches creative writing at the University of King's College and the University of Guelph. After many years in Canada she returned to Israel in 2019 and lives in Tel Aviv with her husband and daughter.