Judith Katzir

Judith Katzir was born in 1963 in Haifa

Judith Katzir was born on August 19, 1963, in Haifa. Her parents were both lawyers, and she is the eldest of three children. Haifa and its landscapes appear often in her writing.

She attended the Hugim high school in Haifa. She later studied literature and cinema at Tel Aviv University.

In the 1980s she began publishing short stories in Israeli journals. Her first book, a collection of four novellas called Closing the Sea, came out in 1990. One of its stories, Schlaffstunde, was adapted for the stage and into the film Family Secrets.

Her novels include Matisse Has the Sun in His Belly, Here I Begin and Tzilla, which drew on the life of her great-grandmother. Her work often explores female agency and adolescence, and some of it touches on the Holocaust. Her play Dvora Baron was staged by the Cameri Theatre in 2000.

She works as an editor at Hakibbutz Hameuchad and has taught creative writing. She was once active in the Geneva Initiative. She lives in Tel Aviv with her husband, film producer Moshe Levinson, and they have two daughters.