Yossi Avni-Levy

Yossi Avni-Levy was born in 1962 in Ra'anana

Yossi Avni-Levy was born on 25 May 1962 in Ra'anana. His father was an Afghan Jew and his mother an Iranian Jew.

He served in the IDF as an intelligence officer. He studied history of the Middle East and Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating in 1983, and earned a law degree there in 1991.

As a diplomat he worked in Israeli embassies in Germany, Serbia, Montenegro and Poland. He was spokesman of the Foreign Ministry from 2008 to 2011 and ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro from 2010 to 2016. During his term, Serbia passed a 2015 law on returning heirless Jewish property, and he was the first Israeli ambassador in Belgrade to visit Kosovo.

He began publishing short stories under the pen name Yossi Avni. His 1995 collection The Garden of Dead Trees dealt with the gay community of Tel Aviv, and one of its stories became the 2013 film Snails in the Rain. His novels include A Man Without Shadow from 2007, Ode of the Sins from 2010 on the Holocaust, and Three Days in Summer.

In 2020 he became ambassador to Lithuania and served until 2022. Three Days in Summer, set in a Jewish community in Lithuania before the Nazi invasion, won the Brenner Prize in 2024 and the Sapir Prize. He is openly gay and has a son and a daughter with his partner.