Rachel Bluwstein Sela (20 September (Julian calendar) 1890 – 16 April 1931) was a Hebrew-language poet who immigrated to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1909.

Rachel was born in Saratov[1] in Imperial Russia on 20 September 1890, the eleventh daughter of Isser-Leib and Sophia Bluwstein, and granddaughter of the rabbi of the Jewish community in Kiev.

[2] At the age of 19, Rachel visited Ottoman Palestine, with her sister Shoshana, en route to Italy, where they were planning to study art and philosophy.

Later, Rachel moved to Kvutzat Kinneret on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where she studied and worked in a women's agricultural school.

[3] She returned to Palestine on board the ship Ruslan and for a while joined the small agricultural kibbutz Degania, a settlement neighbouring her previous home at Kinneret.

[9] Eventually, the majority of her poems were published there on a weekly basis, and quickly became popular with the Jewish community in Palestine and, later, the State of Israel.

Lyrical, exceedingly musical, and characterised by its simple language and deep feeling, her poetry deals with fate, her own difficult life, and death.

Another major creative influence on Rachel’s poetry was the Acmeists and their leader, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

Rachel’s style reflects the movement’s strive for “clarity, accuracy, conciseness, and economy of language” in poetry.

[12] Rachel was the first Jewish woman poet in The British Mandate of Palestine to receive recognition in a genre that was practiced solely by men.

Poems by Rachel have been translated to English, German, Czech, Polish, Esperanto, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Basque (by Benito Lertxundi) and Slovak.

In 2011, Rachel was chosen as one of four great poets whose portraits would be on Israeli currency (the other three being Leah Goldberg, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and Nathan Alterman).

[14] Individual poems have been published in Afrikaans, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, Esperanto, French, Frisian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish.