Ilana Hammerman

Ilana Hammerman was born in 1944 in Haifa

Ilana Hammerman was born in Haifa in 1944 to parents who came from Poland. She studied literature and philology at universities in France, Germany and Israel.

From 1985 she worked at the Am Oved publishing house as a literary editor and translator. She edited the Sifriya La'am series for several years with Nili Mirsky, and founded the series Proza Aheret and Te'uda. She translates mainly fiction from German and French, including works by Kafka, Flaubert, Camus, Céline, Brecht and Nietzsche.

She won the Tchernichovsky Prize for translation in 2006. In early 2012 she left Am Oved in protest over the appointment of a retired police officer, Yaakov Bray, as its director. In 2016 she founded the series Ha'Proza Sheli at Ahuzat Bayit, and after retiring she studied literary Arabic and began translating from Arabic.

She served on the council of Ratz and on the boards of B'Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and writes against Israeli control over Palestinians. In 2010 she founded the women's group Lo Metsaytot, whose members illegally drove Palestinian women from the West Bank into Israel. A criminal investigation was opened, but the Attorney General decided not to prosecute.