Eva Etzioni-Halevy is professor emeritus of political sociology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She has published fourteen academic books and numerous articles, before turning to the writing of Biblical novels.A child Holocaust survivor, Eva was born in Vienna, Austria, and was fortunate to escape as a small child with her parents in 1939. She spent World War II in Italy, partly in an Italian concentration camp and partly in hiding. Having survived the Holocaust in this manner she moved to what was then Palestine in 1945. She lived most of her life in Israel, but spent lengthy stretches of time in the United States and Australia before returning to Israel in 1989, to seek her roots there. As part of searching for her roots, she returned to the religious orientation she had previously abandoned. It is this root seeking that also led her to the discovery of the rich world of the Bible, and to the intention of bringing it to life for contemporary readers through the writing of Biblical novels.Her Biblical novels so far are THE SONG OF HANNAH (Plume/Penguin, 2005), and (forthcoming) THE GARDEN OF RUTH (Plume/Penguin, January 2007).Eva lives in Tel Aviv with her husband; she has three grown children.