Michal Govrin

Prof. Michal Govrin

A novelist, poet, and stage director. Govrin has published eleven poetry books, novels, and essays, which have garnered many prizes in Israel and abroad, including the novels The Name (Kugel Prize and Koret Prize for Jewish books), Snapshots (ACUM Prize for Literary Achievement), the prose poetry volume The Making of the Sea, a Chronicle of Exegesis, and recently, the novel The Shores of Ashkelon, and the book Body of Prayer, co-authored with Jacques Derrida. Govrin, who holds a doctorate in contemporary sacred theater from the University of Paris, has directed plays in all the leading theaters in Israel. She is a pioneer of the neo-Jewish stream in Israeli literature and theater, and has adapted for the stage Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s Story of the Seven Beggars, and Martin Mordechai Buber’s Gog and Magog. Govrin is a professor at Tel Aviv University, and headed a multidisciplinary Holocaust Memory Transmission and Fiction research group at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She was selected by Salon du livres de Paris as one of thirty writers who left a mark on world literature, and is a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.