Ayelet Tsabari

My guest on this 100^th episode is Ayelet Tsabari. Ayelet is the author of the short-story collection The Best Place on Earth and the memoir The Art of Leaving, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. She is also a co-editor of the anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language. Her most recent book is the novel Songs for the Brokenhearted, published by HarperCollins Canada in 2024. That book won a National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the AJL Jewish Fiction Award, and was named a book of the year by the Globe and Mail and the CBC. Kirkus Review called it “a timely, well-crafted tale, imbued with cultural and personal sorrow.”

Ayelet and I talk about what she calls “the Situation” (i.e., the war in Gaza), about her occasional wish to write something completely unrelated to her identity, and about why she feels a bit apologetic, in her words, about her next book project.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.