Tehila Hakimi

Tehila Hakimi (b. 1982) is a mechanical engineer by training. She made her debut in 2014 with the poetry collection Tomorrow We Work, which garnered widespread acclaim from readers and critics alike.

Hakimi’s poetry challenges the traditional notion of the lyrical subject as a voice speaking from a private and isolated space; hers is the voice of a besieged subjectivity, constantly unsettled and violated by the gusts of a noisy, digitized reality governed by algorithms and market forces.

Hakimi’s poetry stems from a world where the borders between interior and exterior, work and home, have dissolved, and the poet has become enmeshed in the workspace down to the most intimate fibers of her being. Yet she is determined to wrest a lyrical voice from the course of an endless workday, channeling it through bureaucratic forms, office memos, job interviews, and online dating platforms.

In her subsequent works — the graphic novella In the Water (2016) and the prose collection Company (2018) — Hakimi further examines how economic and class realities in a neoliberal world encroach on her protagonists’ lives, eroding their humanity.

Hakimi’s first novel, Hunting in America (2023), follows an Israeli woman who relocates to the United States for her job. Soon, she becomes embroiled in a corporate hunting ritual. However, this return to “nature” devoid of any primal or sensory vitality, starkly reveals the contours of an oppressive and dehumanizing reality—an existence reduced to sterile repetition and synthetic gestures. Confronted with this grim landscape, the protagonist faces an uneasy choice: to submit to social rituals that erode her humanity or take drastic measures to sever herself from the machinery governing her life. The novel received critical acclaim. Hakimi won the Bernstein Prize in 2015.

Photography: Silan Dallal