Ma’ayan Harel, a doctoral student at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is writing a thesis on the representation of illness in modern Hebrew literature. She received both her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the latter with a thesis on the works of David Grossman. She has also dealt with the works of Lea Goldberg, Dalia Ravikovitch and T. Carmi.