Savyon Liebrecht

Savyon Liebrecht was born in 1948 in Munich

Savyon Liebrecht was born Sabine Sosnowski in Munich, Germany, on 13 January 1948. Her parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland, and she was the eldest of three children. The family moved to Israel in 1950, and she grew up in Beit Dagan and later in Bat Yam.

After serving in the IDF, she went to London to study journalism and changed her name to Savyon. She then studied philosophy and literature at Tel Aviv University. She worked as a journalist for the monthly magazine At.

Her first story collection, Apples from the Desert, came out in 1986. Several more collections and the novels A Man and a Woman and a Man and The Women My Father Knew followed. Her work deals with Holocaust survivors and their children, the lives of women, and tensions between religious and secular Israelis and between Jews and Arabs.

She adapted many of her own stories into plays, which were staged at Beit Lessin and abroad. Her play The Banality of Love, about Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, became an opera that premiered in Regensburg in 2018. Several of her works were made into television dramas and feature films, and her books have been translated into 9 languages.

Liebrecht lives in Tel Aviv. She is divorced and has 2 children.