Leah Aini

Leah Aini was born in 1962 in Tel Aviv

Leah Aini was born in Tel Aviv in 1962. Her father was a Holocaust survivor from Thessaloniki and her mother had roots in Nashdidan, so she grew up around Ladino and Aramaic. She began writing at a young age.

She studied literature and language at the Kibbutzim Seminary. She later worked as an editor at the daily paper Al HaMishmar.

A lecturer asked her for poems, and she turned a prose piece she had written as a soldier into the poem Ahmed. It appeared in her first poetry collection, Portrait, in 1988. After a second collection she returned to prose for adults and also wrote for children and youth.

Her novel Rose of Lebanon, published in 2009, tells of a female soldier volunteer who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor from Thessaloniki. Her work has been translated into many languages, and in 2008 Tamar Giladi released an album of songs set to her poems. She teaches prose writing in workshops.

Her awards include the Bernstein Prize in 2006 for the play Mi Alma, the Bialik Prize in 2010, the Newman Prize in 2014 and the Agnon Prize in 2019. In 2024 her 2023 novel The Foreign Legion's Child was named to the Sapir Prize long list.