Hannah Bat Shahar

Hannah Bat Shahar was born in 1944 in Jerusalem

Bat Shahar was born in Jerusalem in 1944. Her father was Rabbi Bezalel Zolty, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. She is married to Rabbi Yehoshua Eichenstein, head of the Yad Aharon yeshiva, and they have 5 children.

She studied at the Beit Ya'akov schools, which do not teach modern Hebrew literature. In the 1980s she joined a writing workshop led by Yoram Kaniuk and Aharon Appelfeld. From 1995 to 2000 she studied literature at the Hebrew University and earned an M.A.

She writes under a pen name because she feared that being identified would lead to her exclusion from Haredi society and harm her children's marriage matches. Her first book, a collection of 6 short stories, appeared in 1985 and won the Newman Prize for debut books. Later books dealt more with religious life and with subjects seen as taboo among the Haredim.

She received the Prime Minister's Prize in 1994. Her 2008 novel Shadows in the Mirror follows a Haredi mother and her 2 daughters facing sexual abuse by the father. After her children married, she gave television interviews.