Wendy Elliman
I was born and grew up in London, moving to Jerusalem at 23, three months after the Yom Kippur War. I came to Israel to be part of the Jewish adventure of our times, and that’s certainly proven true!
I began writing for Hadassah Magazine in 1979 and have been doing so ever since, making me something of a veteran of both journalism and Israeli history. My work has focused largely on medicine and science, but I have also written about people, families, Jewish life and the everyday realities of Israeli life.
Over the years, my journalism has appeared in publications including Hadassah Magazine, The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, The Irish Times and the Irish Examiner. I have written about everything from medical breakthroughs and Israeli research to the deeply personal experience of living through illness, bereavement and war.
Writing has given me the privilege of spending time with an extraordinary range of people: scientists trying to solve seemingly impossible problems, doctors and patients confronting illness, families negotiating change, and ordinary people whose lives turn out to be anything but ordinary.
My own life has supplied its share of material.
In 1990, at age 40, I unexpectedly became mother to triplet daughters. They arrived three weeks early, changed everything, and quickly made it clear that raising three children of the same age was not going to be a conventional experience.
There were also cancer, divorce, widowhood, the upheavals of raising three daughters, and the long process of discovering who we all were once the roles we had been given no longer fitted.
I have written about some of these experiences in my journalism. OUTNUMBERED brings them together for the first time in a memoir.
I live in Jerusalem and continue to write.