About Ayelet

Ayelet Tsabari (איילת צברי) is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. She co-edited with Leonarda Carranza and Eufemia Fantetti the anthology Tongues, On Longing and Belonging through Language

Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Kirkus Review’s Best Debut Fiction of 2016, was nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and has been published internationally to great acclaim.

Ayelet was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She studied film and photography in Capilano University’s Media Program in Vancouver, where she directed two documentary films, one of which won an award at the Palm Spring International Short Film Festival.

She wrote her first story in English in 2006.

A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, Ayelet teaches at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, at University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and The Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Track in Creative Writing in Bar Ilan University.

(Photos by Vicky Kroshko and Elsin Davidi)