Karin Berkman was born in South Africa and immigrated to Israel in 1986. She completed her Masters degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

She has recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the poetics of memory in the poetry of Seamus Heaney in the English department at the Hebrew University and will take up a position as a post- doctoral researcher in the Apartheid Stops project. She will be researching the notion of exile in the poetry of five South African poets; Dennis Brutus, Keroapetse Kgotsitsile, Mazisi Kunene, Mongane Serote, Arthur Nortje and Breyten Breytenbach.