Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada is a Japanese-German author of extraordinary formal intelligence whose fiction explores the strangeness of language, identity, and belonging from a genuinely unique vantage point: she writes in both Japanese and German with equal fluency, and her experience of living between two languages that share almost nothing has become the central subject of her art.

Born in Tokyo in 1960, she moved to Hamburg at twenty-two and has remained in Germany ever since. Her works — Where Europe Begins, The Naked Eye, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Scattered All Over the Earth — exist at the border of essay and fiction, parable and reportage, and they treat language itself as a strange and unstable medium rather than a transparent vehicle. She has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. She is one of the most original literary voices alive.