2009 Presenters
Anita Diamant
Anita Diamant’s first book was The New Jewish Wedding. Written in the year following her own wedding, Diamant’s handbook combined a contemporary sensibility, respect for tradition, and a welcoming prose style. She followed the wedding book with five more guidebooks to Jewish life and lifecycle events.
In 1997, she published her first work of fiction, The Red Tent, inspired by a few lines from Genesis. The book became a word-of-mouth bestseller thanks to reader recommendations, book groups, and support from independent bookstores. In 2001, the independent booksellers alliance honored The Red Tent as its "Booksense Best Fiction" selection. There are editions in more than 25 countries world-wide, including Australia, England, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden.
Diamant’s second novel, Good Harbor, is a contemporary story that also explores the importance of women's friendships as a source of strength and happiness. With The Last Days of Dogtown, she returned to historical fiction. Set on Cape Ann in the early 1800s, The Last Days of Dogtown describes life in a poor, rural community inhabited by widows, spinsters and other marginal women, freed Africans, and orphan children.
Her newest novel, Day After Night, returns to the land of The Red Tent to tell the stories of women who lived through the Holocaust and await the future in a British internment camp. It is a story of loss, hope and courage set in the days before the founding of the state of Israel.
APPEARING IN: Struggles in a Strange Land
