Alice Bialsky

Alice Bialsky was born in Moscow to Jewish dissident parents, in 1968, the year that Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. She immigrated to Israel in 1990 and studied cinema and television at Tel Aviv University. She has directed a number of documentaries that have been aired in Israel and abroad.

The Crown Not Heavy was Bialsky’s first novel. It appeared first in Russian in 2011, published by Eksmo. In 2014 the Hebrew translation and adaptation was published to widespread critical acclaim, and was seen as a trailblazing work in contemporary Israeli literature. It was selected as one of the best Israeli debut novels of the 21st century by the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, and Bialsky was awarded a writing grant for debut novelists by the National Library of Israel. Bialsky’s second book, Superfluous People was published in Hebrew in 2018. In it, she returned to the protagonists in The Crown Not Heavy and tells the story of their lives many years before the collapse of the USSR.

Photo by: Ido Berlad