Maytal Sohar

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A poet, editor and writer, Maytal Sohar was born in 1984 and lives in Tel Aviv. She has degrees in Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, and is currently writing her doctorate, on the topic of parasitism in Hebrew poetry.

 

The House is Taken, her 2014 poetry collection, was awarded the Ministry of Culture’s Prize for Poetry. Nevada, her first novel, won the Brenner Prize for a First Book. Sohar has published essays and short stories in periodicals and literary journals including Granta, Moznaim, Helicon, HaMusach and HaOketz.

 

Sohar works as a librarian at Tel Aviv’s Beit Ariela Library, and as a freelance editor of prose and poetry.

 

Title: Nevada

Novella

Publisher: Hapoalim – Hakibbutz Hameuchad

Year: 2019

80 pp.

 

Translation rights: World

Audio visual rights: Not available

Translation: Partial English translation by Ilana Kurshan

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​Winner of the Brenner Prize for a First Book (2020)

 

After a pilot makes an emergency landing in the middle of a desert, the three people on board the plane must all learn to deal with a completely new life—and not them alone. In short, precise fragments, the daughter of the pilot, born after the crash, relates memories about life after the crash—and before it. In a short and brutally honest book, Natalie, the pilot’s daughter, depicts family life after the accident, vicariously living through the crash again and again with every interaction between her family and herself.

 

There was no black box on the plane, no confirmation of what did happen that day, and Natalie must scrabble for the pieces that make up the story of her mother and father and her family before the crash. But in this personal black box of testimony, there is also a delicate story about a father and a daughter. Polar opposites of one another, they nevertheless strive to exist with each other. A father becoming more despondent by the moment; and a little girl who despite it all tries—like her father, once upon a time—to fly.

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Critical Praise

 

This book is a pure and refined literary act. It offers a new form of literary expression, open and candid.

Citation, Brenner Prize Jury

 

Modest in size, refined in content, presented in direct and straight style, it rips through the sense of Israeliness like friendly fire.

Maariv

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