Rita Ḳogan

Rita Ḳogan was born in 1976 in Saint Petersburg

Rita Kogan was born in 1976 in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, to a Jewish family. Her mother taught literature and her father was a theater director. In 1990 she immigrated to Israel with her mother.

She served in the IDF as an adjutancy officer. She studied computer science at the Technion and works as an engineer in the chip industry.

Kogan writes mainly in Hebrew rather than Russian. Her poems deal with immigrant life and with racism and sexism faced by Russian-speaking women in Israel. Her first poetry book appeared in 2015, and she has also published prose and translated Russian and French poetry and children's classics into Hebrew.

She lives in Tel Aviv with her partner, the poet Alfred Cohen, and the couple has no children. In 2018 she received an honorable mention in the First Lady of the State of Israel Prize for Hebrew Poetry, and in 2025 she won the UZG Prize.