Ayelet Tsabari

Ayelet Tsabari’s debut story collection, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. It was also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book, and was nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Excerpts from The Art of Leaving have won a National Magazine Award, a Western Magazine Award, and an Edna Staebler Award. Tsabari is the recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Tsabari teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction and the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Education. She will also be joining the faculty at Tel Aviv University this fall.

Website: ayelettsabari.com
Twitter: @AyeletTsabari
Instagram: @ayuli1

A passionate account of the pain, fire, and fury of adolescence and young adulthood.” — Camilla Gibb

FESTIVAL BOOK

The Art of Leaving

Ayelet Tsabari was 21 years old the first time she left Tel Aviv with no plans to return. The loss of Tsabari’s beloved father in years past had left her alienated and exiled within her own large Yemeni family and at odds with her Mizrahi identity. By leaving, she would be free to reinvent herself and to rewrite her own story. For nearly a decade, Tsabari travelled as though her life might go stagnant without perpetual motion. Soon the act of leaving – jobs, friends, and relationships – came to feel most like home. But a series of dramatic events forced Tsabari to examine her choices and her feelings of longing and displacement. By periodically returning to Israel, Tsabari began to examine her background and unearthed a family history that had been untold for years. What she found resonated deeply with her own immigrant experience and struggles with new motherhood.

Beautifully written, frank, and poignant, The Art of Leaving is a courageous coming-of-age story that reflects on identity and belonging and that explores themes of family and home – both inherited and chosen.