Yu Miri

Yu Miri writes about the people Japan would rather not see — the displaced, the marginalized, the ethnically Korean residents who exist in the gaps of Japanese society. Tokyo Ueno Station won the National Book Award for Translated Literature with its devastating portrait of a homeless man haunting the park beside the Imperial Palace, his life a quiet indictment of postwar Japan's broken promises. It's one of the most powerful short novels of the twenty-first century.

The End of August is her most ambitious work — an epic family saga spanning Korea and Japan across the twentieth century, tracing the intertwined fates of colonizer and colonized. Born in Yokohama to Korean parents, Yu Miri draws on her own experience of living between cultures, and her prose carries the weight of histories that official narratives prefer to forget. She writes with unflinching honesty and a fierce, quiet beauty.