Maya Tevet Dayan is an Israeli-Canadian poet and writer, who shares her time between Tel-Aviv and Vancouver. She's the recipient of the Israeli Prime Minister award for literature for 2018, and an honorable mention from the Kugel Poetry Prize for 2016. Poems from her two critically acclaimed poetry collections have been translated into English, Spanish and German, have appeared in various Israeli and international magazines, among which are Modern Poetry in Translation, Literary Review of Canada, Asymptote
. She is also the author of a novel "One Thousand Years to Wait", that was a bestseller in Israel.
Tevet Dayan holds a PhD in Indian philosophy and literature, had lectured in Tel-Aviv University, Haifa university and the University of British Columbia. In her dissertation she translated the Sanskrit Naishadhiya-Charitam – one of the five "great poetries" into English, with special focus on the role of the Goddess of Language in that piece. Her essays, along with her translations of Sanskrit poetry have appeared in various venues in Israel, the United States and India.
Together with her husband, Harel, and their three daughters, Tevet Dayan has moved between dozens of homes in four different continents. Travel life and wandering play a major role in her writing, along with the questions that arise from it: the question of home, of longing, of womanhood and of the human's place.