Irit Amiel was born in Poland in 1931 as Irena Librowicz.
She survived the Second World War having escaped from the Częstochowa ghetto and living under false Aryan papers. Via illegal routes and displaced persons camps in Germany, Italy and Cyprus she reached Palestine in 1947. She has lived in Israel ever since, where she studied history and literature. She works as a poet, writer and translator in two languages, Polish and Hebrew.
Irit Amiel’s debut volume of poetry Egzamin z Zaglady had three editions in Hebrew (1994, 1995, 1998) and was published twice in Polish (1994, 1998). The subsequent two collections of poems were also printed in Poland: Nie zdążyłam (Łódź 1998) and Wdychać głęboko (2002). This publication is an enhanced, bilingual edition of the latter.
Her volume of short stories Osmaleni (Warszawa 1999) received widespread praise and was nominated in Poland for the prestigious Nike Prize. Her collection of short stories Podwójny krajobraz was published in 2009 and was shown the same appreciation. It was translated into Italian a year later. The book Osmaleni was translated by the author into Hebrew, then published in Hungarian, English, French and German.
Irit Amiel has translated the writing of M. and M. Mariańscy (1987), Mieczysław Frenkel (1988), poems of Lea Rozenzweig (1993) and Abramek Koplowicz (1995) into Hebrew. Her translations of Polish works by Leo Lipski, Marek Hłasko, Henryk Grynberg and Hanna Krall, as well as Wisława Szymborska’s poems and a number of theatre plays have been published in Israel. She has prepared a Polish anthology of key contemporary Hebrew poets. She also translated into Polish one of the most significant plays by Hanoch Lewin, Requiem, which was published in the volume: Hanoch Lewin, Ja i Ty i Następna Wojna. Teatr życia i śmierci (Me and You and the Next War. Theatre of Life and Death; Kraków 2009).
In 2014 her autobiography Życie – tytuł tymczasowy was published.
