Karen Alkalay-Gut

Karen Alkalay-Gut was born in 1945 in London

Karen Alkalay-Gut was born in London in 1945. In 1948 she moved with her parents and her brother Joseph to Rochester, New York.

She studied at the University of Rochester, earning a BA with honors and then an MA in English literature in 1967. After teaching at the State University of New York at Geneseo, she returned to Rochester to complete a doctorate on Theodore Roethke.

She immigrated to Israel in 1972 and taught at Ben Gurion University of the Negev until 1976. In 1977 she began teaching English literature at Tel Aviv University, where she worked until she retired in 2014. She also taught at Bar-Ilan University and the Kibbutzim College.

Her first poetry collection, Making Love: Poems, appeared in 1980 with help from poet David Avidan. She wrote a biography of Adelaide Crapsey and translated hundreds of Hebrew poems by writers such as Yehuda Amichai and Hanoch Levin. She worked with the fashion house Comme il faut and with musician Ronen Shapira.

In 1980 she helped found the Israel Association of Writers in English and later chaired it. She received the Rubinlicht Prize in 2019 for her contribution to Yiddish literature. She is married to Ezra Gut.