Yehudit Hendel is an Israeli writer. She was born in Warsaw in 1926 to a Hasidic family. In 1930, her family immigrated to Israel and lived in Nesher. Her mother died of typhus when Hendel was a young girl and she moved with her father to Haifa. In 1948 she married the painter Zvi Meirovich. The couple lived in Haifa and had two children. Hendel’s first stories were published in 1942. Her point of view, her language, and the protagonists of her stories were largely different from those of the other writers of her generation. Her literary voice was one of the first female voices in Hebrew literature after the War of Independence. In 1954, she won the Asher Barash Prize for her book Streets of Steps. The novel was very successful and was adapted into a play in the national theater in 1957. After the publication of this novel, Yehudit Handel published no work for nearly fifteen years. In 1969, her book The Court of Momo the Great was published and was later adapted for television by Judd Ne’eman. Yehudit Hendel published ten books, which were very successful. In the 1980s she published a book about her journey to Poland, Near Quiet Villages, and her radio conversations about it earned a large audience. In 1971, Hendel’s husband became ill, and she spent the next few years nursing him. After her husband died in 1974, she moved to Tel Aviv. Yehudit Hendel is the 1997 Bialik Prize laureate and the 2003 Israel Prize for Literature laureate. She died in Tel Aviv in 2014.