Lives of the Dead

Hanoch Levin (1943–1999) was born in Palestine to Holocaust survivors from Poland. Originally a poet, he exploded onto the Israeli theatre scene in 1968 with his play You, Me and the Next War, a sharp critique of the 1967 Six-Day War. The play was extremely controversial and the run ended when some of the actors refused to play their parts. Levin continued to make a name for himself by writing and directing plays that critiqued Israeli society. When his denunciation of the Golda Meir administration, The Queen of the Bathtub, opened in 1970, demonstrations again led to a premature closing. As a consequence, Levin withdrew from the public eye, although he continued writing (50 plays in total, 34 of which were produced), directing many of these plays himself. He continued working until the very end, holding auditions for his newest play from his hospital bed. Atar Hadari was born in Israel, raised in England, and lives in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. He studied acting and writing at the University of East Anglia before winning a scholarship to study poetry and playwriting with Derek Walcott at Boston University. His plays have won awards from the BBC, ACE, National Foundation of Jewish Culture (New York), European Association of Jewish Culture (Brussels) and the RSC, where he was Young Writer in Residence. Plays have been staged at the Finborough Theatre, Wimbledon Studio Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum (where he was a Mentor Playwright), Nat Horne Studio Theatre (New York) and Valdez, Alaska. As a translator, he was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award with 'Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik' (Syracuse University Press). His own poems have won various awards and prizes.