Elana Gomel was born in Kiev, Ukraine. She emigrated to Israel with her mother, noted writer and essayist Maya Kaganskaya, in 1978. She obtained her BA, MA and PhD in English literature from Tel Aviv University, and went on to her post-doc at Princeton University as a Fulbright Scholar. Gomel subsequently taught and researched at many world-class universities, including Stanford, the University of Hong Kong, and the Venice International University. She served as Chair of the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she is currently an Associate Professor. Gomel is the author of four academic books: Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (Ohio State University Press, 2003), Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination (Continuum, 2010), Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Routledge, 2014) and Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule London (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014). In 2006, Gomel published a book in Hebrew called Us and Them, about the experience of Russian emigrants in Israel – one of the first comprehensive treatments of the subject. It was subsequently published in the U.S. as The Pilgrim Soul: Being Russian in Israel (Cambria Press, 2009). She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles on narrative theory, post-humanism, science fiction, Dickens, and Victorian culture.
Gomel has been active in the science-fiction community in Israel since its inception, participating in the development of annual science-fiction conventions ICon, Utopia and Worlds. Together with her graduate students, she has organized an international science-fiction symposium at TAU, currently in its fourth year. She has also striven to bring Israeli science fiction and fantasy on the world stage by writing and lecturing about it and by co-editing the groundbreaking collection of essays With Both Feet On the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2013).
Gomel has published more than twenty fantasy and science fiction stories in New Horizons, Aoife’s Kiss, Bewildering Stories, Timeless Tales, The Singularity, Dark Fire and many other magazines; and in several anthologies, including People of the Book and Apex Book of World Science Fiction. Her fantasy novel, A Tale of Three Cities, was published by Dark Quest Books in 2013.