Maya Arad

Maya Arad was born in 1971 in Rishon LeZion

Maya Arad was born in Rishon LeZion in 1971, one of three sisters. Her mother was a psychologist and her father a pediatrician. In 1973 the family moved to Kibbutz Nahal Oz, and in 1982 it returned to Rishon LeZion.

She served in the IDF Education Corps, where she met her future husband, Reviel Netz. They married in 1994 and have two daughters. She earned a B.A. in Classics and Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. in linguistics in London.

In 1996 she left Israel, for work reasons and in opposition to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and she later became a U.S. citizen. She taught at Harvard University, the University of Geneva and in the drama department at Stanford University. She has been a writer-in-residence at Stanford's Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

Her first novel, Another Place, a Foreign City, was written in verse on the model of Eugene Onegin and became a bestseller. Later books include Seven Moral Failings, Suspected Dementia and The Hebrew Teacher. The English translation of The Hebrew Teacher won the National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation, and in 2024 she shared the Newman Prize for Hebrew Literature.