Levin’s poetic voice – mordant, witty, irreverent, erotic and highly satirical, yet also whimsical and delicate – is arresting, distinctive and unusual. When this volume was published in Israel, it proved to be enormously popular and went through three editions in its first year and has continued to be reprinted since. This bilingual edition makes his poetry available to an English-language readership for the first time – to date Levin is only known in the UK as a playwright.
Atar Hadari was born in Israel, raised in England, and trained as an actor and writer at the University of East Anglia before winning a scholarship to study poetry and playwrighting with Derek Walcott at Boston University. His plays have won awards from the BBC, Arts Council England, National Foundation of Jewish Culture (New York), European Association of Jewish Culture (Brussels) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was Young Writer in Residence.
His Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award and his poems have won the Daniel Varoujan award from New England Poetry Club, the Petra Kenney Award, a Paumanok Poetry Award and many other prizes. His nineteen-page translation of Hanoch Levin’s Lives of the Dead filled a third of Poetry magazine in 2009.