I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today we are joined by Yoav Avni. He is an Israeli author, translator, editor, and writing mentor, born in 1969. His fiction includes novels and short stories. His novels have been published by two of Israel’s leading publishing houses, Kinneret Zmora Bitan and Keter. One of them, Three Things for a Desert Island, became a national bestseller, and he is a two-time winner of the Israeli Geffen Award for Best Speculative Novel, often regarded as Israel’s equivalent of the Hugo Award.His latest novel, Time Clocks, was published in Hebrew in December 2024 and will be published in English on September 29, 2026, by Roundfire Books in the UK and US. His novel Crossing a River Twice was first published in Hebrew in 2016 and is scheduled for English-language publication in the UK and the United States in 2027. Some of his short stories have been published in N-Zine (London), Words Without Borders, JewishFiction.net, and Jewcy. His writing blends magic realism and speculative fiction with humor, emotional warmth, and a deep curiosity about human nature, drawing inspiration from authors such as Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Jerome K. Jerome, Gerald Durrell, and Douglas Adams.
Why do
you write?
That’s a little like asking why I live. I’m a storyteller. Writing is my
dialogue with the world.
What’s something that’s true about you but no one
believes?
I have koumpounophobia, although in my case it isn’t really fear so much as
a physical aversion to buttons. People usually think I’m joking. I’m not. There
are no buttons in my wardrobe. None on my bedsheets either. It also raises a
surprisingly philosophical question: what exactly makes a button a button? Is
it the material? The shape? For me, it seems to be the holes and the thread
between them. A random circle or square becomes a button once those appear.
Which is why, for example, the metal fastener on a pair of jeans is perfectly
legal. And of course: blessed be the inventor of the zipper.
What’s the best money you’ve ever spent as a writer?
Traveling, and a good laptop. One gives me material, the other gives me
somewhere to put it.
Summarize your book using only gifs or emojis.
🕰️🎩👮♀️🔥⚔️💻❤️☕
Would you and your main character(s) get along?
Yes. Boaz Grand, the protagonist in Time Clocks, is about 85% me
(and 15% water), so I think we’d get along just fine.
If you could spend the day with another author, who would you choose and
why?
Jerome K. Jerome. I’d like to spend the day walking along the Thames with
him, without George, Harris, or Montmorency, and hear him talk about all three.
What’s the one book someone else wrote that you wish you had written?
Richard Adams’s Watership Down. I wish I’d written it, but at least
I had the privilege of translating it into Hebrew.
What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?
Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: “A book no more contains
reality than a clock contains time.” I loved that line long before I wrote Time
Clocks.
What’s on your literary bucket list?
To keep writing the books I would want to read but that
haven’t been written yet, and to keep reaching new readers, communities, and
languages with them.
What would you do if you could live forever?
The same things I do now, only with much greater peace of mind. And maybe a
little more slowly.
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Purchase here
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is a time-travel novel about
learning to be present.
Boaz Grand is an AI developer whose system, FocalAI, has become famous
for producing cryptic prophetic limericks on a popular television show. One
unfortunate appearance by Boaz on the show ends with him losing his job.
On his way home, he encounters three people who seem to have arrived in
present-day Israel from completely different periods of history: a biblical
shepherd, a nineteenth-century Frenchman, and a policewoman from the 1980s.
Somehow, their arrival appears to match part of FocalAI’s latest limerick,
drawing Boaz into a much larger mystery involving artificial intelligence,
friendship, memory, and time.
But beneath the time travel, the novel is really about our relationship
with the present: learning to recognize it, feel at home in it, and accept that
it is the only part of time we can actually live in.
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