Aharon Shabtai

Aharon Shabtai, a poet and translator of Greek drama into Hebrew, was born in 1939 in Tel Aviv. He spent his childhood on Kibbutz Merhavia. After his military service, he studied Greek and philosophy and graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Cambridge University. His doctoral dissertation, on Aeschylus, was researched at the Sorbonne and defended at the Hebrew University in 1979. From 1972 to 1985, Shabtai taught Greek drama in the theater department of the Hebrew University. From 1990 to 2006 he was a lecturer on Greek literature in the poetics and comparative literature department of Tel Aviv University.

Shabtai has received the Prime Minister’s Prize (1978), the Ministry of Education Award for Translation (1993), the Tchernichovsky Prize for Translation (1999), the Lea Goldberg Prize for his collection of poetry, Tanya (2009), and the Landau Award (2011).