YOKO TAWADA was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Kleist, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes as well as the Goethe Medal. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. MARGARET MITSUTANI is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan's 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).

Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things

YOKO TAWADA was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Kleist, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes as well as the Goethe Medal. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. MARGARET MITSUTANI is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan's 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).

Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things

YOKO TAWADA was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Kleist, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes as well as the Goethe Medal. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. MARGARET MITSUTANI is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan's 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).

Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things