Moshe Sartel
Moshe Sartel was born in Istanbul into a Ladino-speaking family. He moved to Israel in 1949, settling in Petaḥ Tikvah. Sartel studied literature, philosophy, and library sciences at the Hebrew University as well as military history at Tel Aviv University. He has published seven collections of poetry and has received awards for his work, including the President’s Prize for Literature (1997) and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Writers (1999–2000). His epic, intellectual poetry is heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Middle Eastern folk history, and classic Hebrew texts.