2006
38th Max Kade Writer-in-Residence

Gila Lustiger
Author, Translator, and Editor

Photo by Jack Glazier

Gila Lustiger was born in 1963 in Frankfurt am Main, where she spent her youth and school years. When she was eighteen she moved to Tel Aviv and one year later to Jerusalem. She studied Art History and Comparative Literature, and then – along with the last of the German exiles – German Language and Literature at the Hebrew University. She has been living in her chosen homeland, France, since 1987, along with her two children, working as a freelance writer, translator, and editor at a publishing house.

She is the author of three novels:

Die Bestandsaufnahme (1995) Engl. Translation The Inventory (2001)
Aus einer schönen Welt (1997)
So sind wir (2005) (the novel was shortlisted for the German Book Prize as well as longlisted for the Prix Médicis).

She is also the translator of the Israeli poets Asher Reich and T. Carmi, as well as the French writer Jules Supervielle.