Sarah Blau was born in 1973 and raised in the
ultra-Orthodox town of Bnei Brak, near Tel-Aviv. She holds a BA in history and
psychology from Bar-Ilan University. Blau has edited and presented several TV
programs dealing with contemporary views on religion and feminism in the
Orthodox community, and writes reviews for the Hebrew press. She is also a playwright and an actress .Blau has taught at the Holocaust Studies Institute in Haifa,
and In 1999, she began holding an alternative Holocaust memorial service
which ignited great interest and controversy in Israel and abroad.
Blau's writing can be described as modern-Jewish-gothic,
based on ancient Jewish myths, which she
sets up for an ironical reexamination.
In her debut novel, The Book of Creation, a lonely young woman creates
her own man-shaped 'Golem' - a reincarnation of the one the
Jews created in the Warsaw Ghetto; and in her one-woman show, Thy Shall Write, a heartbroken novelist is working on her great novel, a modern version
of the biblical story of Yael and Sisera.
Blau, one
of the most prominent new voices in young Orthodox literature in Israel, was
awarded the Prime Minister's Prize (2015).