Halah author: Hedva Harechavi

Hedva Harechavi, Israeli poet and artist, was born in 1941 in Kibbutz Degania Bet. She has lived most of her life in Jerusalem. Harechavi is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art. Her art works have been exhibited in Israel and abroad. Her first poems published in the Hebrew daily Al-Hamishmar were submitted for publication by the eminent Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg. Goldberg later selected and prepared for publication Harechavi’s first book of Hebrew poetry, Because He Is A King, (1974), which received the Rachel Newman Poetry Prize that same year. A Bird that is Inside Stands Outside: Poems, 1962-2008 was published in 2009 by Kibbutz Hameuchad and the Bialik Institute. Rana, the first book of a trilogy, was published in 2014. Migo, the second in the sequence, was published in 2017 also by Kibbutz Hameuhad. Harechavi has won a number of prizes in poetry, among them the Prime Minister Prize for Poetry in 1982 and again in 1993; the Yehuda Amichai Prize for Poetry in 2010, The Ramat Gan Prize in 2011, The Akum Prize for Poetry in 2013, The Bialik Prize for Hebrew Literature in 2014 and The Leah Goldberg Award in 2020. In Lilach Lachman’s words, “The power of Migo is in crossing hidden boundaries between life and death.”