Introduction

Janet Levine began writing before she understood what writing meant. At five years old, she put short stories in her mother’s hands, and her mother kept every one, certain even then that her daughter would become a published author. Decades later, that early certainty has become a body of work spanning continents, disciplines, and eras of history few people lived through as closely as Levine did. She is a novelist, a longtime educator, a book reviewer, a workshop leader, and a witness to one of the twentieth century’s defining political struggles. Few writers carry that range of experience into their pages. Fewer still can say, as Levine can, that every chapter of a remarkable life points back to a single guiding purpose.

A Young Voice in a Divided Country

Levine’s earliest published work appeared in national South African newspapers while she was still a teenager, a rare feat in any era. But it was the years that followed, not the byline itself, that shaped her most. She came of age during apartheid, and by adulthood found herself serving on the Johannesburg City Council, working alongside international journalists and embassy personnel during a period when politics determined who lived with dignity and who did not. She is careful about how she frames that chapter of her life. She does not call herself a voice for South Africa. She calls herself a witness, someone who stood inside a fraught moment in history and watched morals and emotions collide in real time. She saw injustice at its most brazen, and she saw ordinary people summon extraordinary courage. That tension, between what humanity is capable of destroying and what it is capable of building, would return again and again in her later work as a novelist and teacher.

Thirty Years in the Classroom

For three decades, Levine taught literature and philosophy at Milton Academy, a role that placed her at the intersection of two disciplines she has never treated as separate. She believes great literature does something no other art form can. It changes a reader from the inside, often without the reader noticing it has happened. A powerful book does not announce its influence. It works subconsciously, reshaping how a person sees the world long after the final page is turned. Levine traces that transformative power back thousands of years, to Homer’s Odyssey, which she considers the wellspring from which nearly all great storytelling flows. As a longtime book reviewer for the New York Journal of Books, she has spent years distinguishing between stories that merely entertain and those rare few capable of quietly altering a life. She is candid about how gradual that shift usually is. Genuine change, she says, is subtle, slow, and almost never visible until years later.

Decoding Human Behavior Through the Enneagram

Alongside her literary career, Levine has spent decades leading international workshops on the Enneagram, a psychological framework she describes as heuristic rather than diagnostic. Where conventional psychology often tells a person who they are, the Enneagram asks a person to locate themselves among nine core personality patterns, then reflect on what that placement reveals. Levine has watched that moment of recognition unfold in workshop after workshop. She compares it to a light switching on. People suddenly gain a handle on their own complexity, understanding for the first time why they behave the way they do and how that behavior shapes their relationships with others. It is not simply a professional interest for Levine. It is another form of the same lifelong project that runs through everything she does, helping people see themselves and their world more clearly.

Building Institutions, Not Just Books

Levine’s instinct to build extends well beyond the page. She has founded and led nonprofit organizations in both South Africa and the United States, a choice she attributes to an inexhaustible drive to keep constructing structures for others long after most people would have stepped back. She describes herself, only half joking, as a workaholic who thrives on completing tasks and organizing people around a shared vision. Everything in her life, she admits, tends to become part of a to-do list, though she is quick to note that even rest has recently found its way onto that list. That drive to organize, to build teams she trusts, and to see possibilities others miss has powered every institution she has helped bring into being.

A New Story, Twenty Years in the Making

Levine’s current work in progress, The Awakening of Diya Sharma, marks a distinct turn in her writing, though its roots stretch back two decades. The novel draws together twenty years of Buddhist study, Enneagram psychology, and spiritual practices including meditation and yoga, folding all three into a work of fiction. It is, in many ways, the fullest expression yet of the philosophy she has carried since childhood: sharing expertise to enrich the lives of others. Her earlier novel, Liv’s Secrets, was written during the isolation of the Covid nineteen pandemic, a period Levine found unexpectedly conducive to deep, uninterrupted creative work. Where many found the isolation difficult, she found in it the rare gift of time.

A Thread Through Every Chapter

Asked what single thread connects a life spanning authorship, education, activism, psychology, and journalism across two continents, Levine does not hesitate. It is the same idea that has guided her since she first handed her mother a handful of handwritten stories: sharing expertise to enrich others’ lives. And when asked what she hopes readers carry with them long after closing one of her books, her answer is equally direct. She wants people to understand that ordinary individuals are capable of extraordinary things, in any circumstance, at any point in history. It is a message Levine has not only written but lived, across newsrooms, council chambers, classrooms, workshops, and the pages of her own unfolding story.