Yoav Avni

Yoav Avni was born in 1969 in Givatayim

Yoav Avni was born on November 24, 1969, in Givatayim. He studied economics and management at Tel Aviv University for a bachelor's degree. He earned a master's degree in communications at Clark University.

His first book, the story collection Those Strange Americans, came out in 1995. His first novel, Three Things for a Desert Island, appeared in 2006 and was a bestseller in Israel. His fiction mixes speculative fiction, science fiction and magical realism.

Chong Levi's Fifth won the Geffen Award in 2010, and Herzl Said won it in 2012. His young-adult novel When the World Turned Over, from 2022, was shortlisted for the Geffen Award in 2023. He later published the novel Time Clocks and the memoir I, Director's Cut, both in 2025.

Avni also translates English books into Hebrew, among them Watership Down, My Family and Other Animals and Peter Pan. He works as an editor and a writing mentor and lives in Tel Aviv.