Rami Saari

Rami Saari was born in 1963 in Petah Tikva

Saari was born in Petah Tikva in 1963. As a baby he flew with his mother to Buenos Aires, and the family later returned to Israel. He attended the PICA elementary school and Brenner High School in Petah Tikva.

Before his army service he volunteered at Kibbutz Ma'abarot. Soon after enlisting he was exempted from service and moved to Finland, drawn by the Finnish language he had taught himself. He earned a master's degree in Semitic linguistics and Uralic studies at the University of Helsinki and a PhD in linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

His doctoral thesis on Maltese prepositions, supervised by Gideon Goldenberg, was published by Carmel in 2003. He has published many poetry books and translated works from Albanian, Catalan, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. His own poems have been translated into many languages.

He was house translator of Carmel Publishing from 1998 to 2008 and edited the Tzafon series at Hakibbutz Hameuchad from 2005 to 2014. He also served as national editor of the Israeli pages of the Poetry International website. Some of his poems and translations were set to music and performed by singers such as Nurit Galron and Miki Kam.

Since 2003 he has lived and worked in several places. He also holds Argentine and Finnish citizenship.