Hagar Yanai

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-31

Hagar Yanai was born in 1972 in Kibbutz Barkai, Israel. Following military service, she pursued an eclectic course of spiritual and artistic study, including two years of anthroposophy at Kibbutz Harduf and a year of Zen training at a monastery in Tokyo under a Zen master, before earning a bachelor's degree in creative writing and screenwriting from the Camera Obscura School of Art and a master's degree in literature from Ben-Gurion University. Alongside her fiction career, Yanai has worked extensively in Israeli media as a journalist for outlets including Haaretz and Globes, as a literary and film critic for Israeli television, and as a literary editor, creative writing instructor, and book critic for Army Radio and Channel One. Her debut novel, A Woman in Light (2001), drew on her personal experiences living in Japan, and she followed it with Alex's Eternity Machine (2004), about a female soldier searching for a missing physics prodigy in the Golan Heights. Yanai is best known for her fantasy trilogy comprising The Leviathan of Babylon (2006), The Water Between the Worlds (2008), and Into the Abyss (2017), which follows siblings who enter a parallel, mythologically inflected Babylonian world, blending Mesopotamian mythology with contemporary Israeli sensibilities. She has won the Geffen Award for Best Original Hebrew Fantasy three times, as well as the 2008 Prime Minister's Award for Israeli Authors and the 2019 Devora Omer Award, establishing her as one of the leading figures in contemporary Israeli speculative fiction.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Leviathan of Babylon (2006) · The Leviathan of Babylon Core Canon
• The Water Between the Worlds (2008) · The Leviathan of Babylon Core Canon
• The Journey to the Heart of the Abyss (2017) · The Leviathan of Babylon Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 3 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 3 (3 won)

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