Olga Kirsch (Hebrew: אולגה קירש; 23 September 1924 – 5 June 1997) was a South African and Israeli poet.
In 1949, she married the British-born Israeli mathematician Joseph Gillis, professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, with whom she had two daughters, Ada and Michal, born in 1950 and 1953, respectively.
As she matured, her poetry addresses more personal themes in sonnets dedicated to her husband, the mathematician Joseph Gillis.
Other poems evoke the mourning of her mother and her granddaughter, who died at the age of 9 due to an incurable illness.
[2] Only about a quarter of a century later, in 1972, her third book was published, titled Negentien gedigte, (Nineteen poems), which Daniel Hugo refers as her "second beginning".
In the same way as Elisabeth Eybers, well before Breyten Breytenbach or Sheila Cussons, her life was marked by the exile and the difficulty of writing in Afrikaans away from South Africa.