was born in 1938 in pre-Israel Palestine-Eretz Yisrael, near the city of Hadera.
 
A poet and a writer of short fiction, Porat has published 17 volumes of poetry and fiction in Hebrew, with translations of many of his works published in Israel, Canada, England, and the United States.
 
Porat is the author of The Messiah of LaGuardia, a collection of short stories published in English translation in 1997. He is the winner of Israel's Prime Minister's Prize for Literature in 1996.
 
"Poets are people for whom their whole world, their entire universe, is made from words, from verbal matters. The invisible process of the birth of poetry, is, to my humble opinion, a sudden process of verbal compression."
- Elisha Porat
 
Quotation from an interview with Elisha Porat by Sara Russel for Poetry Life & Times, January 2000
 
artvilla.com/porat
 
porat_el@einhahoresh.org.il