Dory Manor
Author ▪ Translator ▪ Editor
Dory Manor is a bilingual author writing in Hebrew and French, based in Berlin. His work moves between prose and poetry, and between languages and literary traditions. His French novel Le Gorille will be published by Éditions Grasset in March 2026. His Hebrew novel Turn, Turn, Turn was published by Kinneret Zmora in 2025.
Manor has published six books of poetry, four novels, and a memoir. His collection of literary essays The Blessing of Babel appeared in 2025 with Hakibbutz Hameuchad, following his memoir First Heatwave (Nine Souls Press, 2022). His translations have played a central role in shaping contemporary Hebrew literary language.
Born in Tel Aviv, Manor lived in Paris from 1996 to 2006, where he taught Hebrew literature and translation at INALCO and Sciences Po. He later taught poetry, editing, and translation at Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and has edited numerous works by Israeli writers.
His writing and translations have appeared in international literary journals including The Columbia Review, World Literature Today, Granta, and Apulée. He participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and is an Honorary Fellow in Writing.
Manor has received several major literary awards, including the Yehuda Amichai Prize for Poetry, the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Writers, and the Tchernichovsky Prize for Translation. He holds a PhD in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature from INALCO.
In parallel to his writing, Manor is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Altneuland Press, the first Hebrew-language publishing house established outside Israel since the 1940s. Based in Berlin, Altneuland works to place Hebrew literature in conversation with other languages through translation and international publishing collaborations.
Photo: Shai Levy
Work
NOVELS
Le Gorille (Éditions Grasset, forthcoming March 2026) – Manor's first novel written in French.
Turn, Turn, Turn (Kinneret Zmora, 2025) – Manor's latest Hebrew novel.
PROSE
The Blessing of Babel: Essays on Literature and Language (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2025) – A collection exploring the intersections of translation, multilingualism, and literary creation.
First Heatwave: A Memoir (Nine Souls Press, 2022) – A personal narrative examining memory, displacement, and language.
POETRY
The Center of the Flesh: Collected Poems (Mosad Bialik & Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2012) – Manor's selected poems, edited by Prof. Dan Miron. This volume brings together work from his earlier collections: Minority (2001), Baritone (2005), and Alpha and Omega, a libretto co-authored with Anna Herman for an opera based on lithographs by Edvard Munch (2001).
ANTHOLOGIES & EDITORIAL PROJECTS
Niflaata (2015) – Co-edited with Ronen Sonis, the first Hebrew-language anthology of LGBT poetry, spanning texts from ancient Greek and Sumerian poetry to contemporary Israeli verse.
Manor has also co-hosted (with singer-songwriter Rona Kenan and authors Shlomtzion Kenan and Alona Kimhi) a musical and literary radio program on Israel's national network.
TRANSLATIONS
Manor's Hebrew translations include poetry by Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Verlaine, William Blake, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Federico García Lorca. His prose translations include works by René Descartes (Méditations Métaphysiques), Gustave Flaubert (Letters to Louise Colet), Voltaire (Candide), and Molière (L'Avare).
Colletcted Poems
Oh! Literary Magazine
Nifla'ata - LGBT anthology
Selected Reviews
“
Dory Manor is the most important poet of his generation. An extraordinarily gifted poet and translator, his work combines linguistic and rhythmic virtuosity with a highly complex emotional depth and a striking expressiveness.
Chana Kronfeld, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
“
Dory Manor's poetry is virtually perfect. His poetic creations make one think of those statuettes, which, although of a reduced size, have the effect of huge statues majestically installed in certain public squares. Their rhetorical strength, their powerful music, their density and their psychological and philosophical depth endow them with an extraordinarily ample gesture.
Dan Miron, Professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recipient of the Israel Prize for Literature
“
"And all the rest is Hebrew" - this is a good way to define the poetic art of Dory Manor, a virtuoso who has very few equals in the history of Hebrew poetry. And to find one I would not go looking for Nathan Alterman, whose poetry - and the type of virtuosity - have very little in common with Manor, but rather for the Hebrew poets of the Italian Renaissance."
Yoram Bronovski, Haaretz
Dory Manor's collection of poems is a key moment and, so to speak, a watershed in the trajectory of Hebrew poetry, thanks of the poet's daring to rethink poetry from its very beginning, to redefine it and to return (...) to its foundations: prosody, rhyme, technique, perfection of form.