| Shay K. Azoulay | |
| Birth Date: | 24 December 1979 |
| Birth Place: | Tel Aviv |
| Occupation: | novelist, playwright, translator |
| Nationality: | Israeli |
| Citizenship: | Israel |
| Period: | 2005–present |
| Genre: | Literary Fiction |
Shay K. Azoulay (Hebrew: שי אזולאי) is an Israeli writer who writes in English and Hebrew.
Azoulay's debut play, "The Platoon", a satire about the IDF, won first place in the 2012 staged reading festival "Zav Kriah".[1] The play was staged in Tel Aviv's Tzavtah Theater in 2014-2015 and received good reviews in the press, including a review by prominent theater critic Michael Handelzalts, who compared it to the work of Hanoch Levin.[2] The play also stirred controversy, following an article which mistakenly claimed that the play depicts IDF soldiers raping Palestinian women. A member of the Tel Aviv municipal council sent a letter to the theater, demanding that they stop the staging of the play.[3] Azoulay's other work includes the one-act play "Shade", which participated in the Tzavtah Theater's 2012 Short play Festival, and "Barabas" - a reimagining of Christopher Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta".
Azoulay's debut novel Lazaretto was published in summer 2019 in Hebrew.[4] A review in Haaretz described the novel as “an ambitious, high-tension novel, seeped in paranoia... Lazaretto is a disturbing and stirring dystopia which haunted me while I was reading it and even after I’d finished.”[5] The novel was named "Book of the Year" by LaIsha Magazine which dubbed it "the novel that predicted the pandemic"[6]
Azoulay has also written a series of short stories entitled "Minor Writers of the Entropic Age". These stories include "The Invention of H. P. Lovecraft", published in Flapperhouse Magazine,[7] "The Bard of Hastings" published in The Cost of Paper [8] and "Permaculture", which won second prize in the 2016 short fiction contest.[9] Also included in this series is "Jacob Wallenstein, Notes for a Future Biography", a work of fiction regarding a "forgotten" Israeli science fiction novelist and his 1,000 page magnum opus. In 2013 Azoulay submitted this story to Tablet magazine, claiming that it was a true account of the nonexistent writer's life and work. An editor at the magazine was initially excited by the story, but eventually discovered that it was a hoax, though he decided to publish the story anyway, together with a forward explaining his discovery of the hoax.[10]
Other short works by Azoulay have appeared in The Molotov Cocktail and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
Azoulay also works as a Hebrew to English translator, translating non-fiction,[11] children's literature, and plays, including works by playwright Hanoch Levin.[12]