English

YOKO TAWADA

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, educated at Waseda University and has lived in Germany since 1982, where she received her Ph.D. in German literature. She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog. She writes in both German and Japanese, and in 1996, she won the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize, a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture. She also received the Goethe-Medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany and the prestigious Kleist Prize (2016).

E-Mail-Address: tawadaoo@yahoo.co.jp

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Books by New Directions

Three Streets

The Emissary

Memoirs of a Polar Bear

The Bridegroom Was a Dog

The Naked Eye

Facing the Bridge

Where Europe Begins

Writer-in-Residence in USA

1. Villa Aurora, Pacific Palisades Oct.-Nov 1996

2. M.I.T. Boston Feb.-May 1999

3. University of Kentucky April 2004

4. Deutsches Haus of New York University Nov.-Dec. 2004

5. Washington University in St.Louis March-April 2008

6. Stanford University Feb.2009

7. Cornell University April 2009

8. DAAD Distinguished Chair in Contemporary Poetics in NYU’s Department of German 2015

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2018

National Book Award for Translated Literature has been awarded to Margaret Mitsutani’s translation of The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, published by New Directions. The judges’ citation reads: “The Emissary is set in near-future Japan – ecologically devastated and socially isolated – in which children are fragile and deteriorate with age even as the great-grandparents left to raise them grow older and stronger. In Margaret Mitsutani’s translation, Yoko Tawada’s novel is playful, powerful, and wise. She brings to life a world in which boundaries between species, families, and genders blur and reconfigure. Tawada’s characters embody the idea that just living is not enough when the future is at stake.” 

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2016

The Profound Empathy of Yoko Tawada

BY RIVKA GALCHEN OCT. 27, 2016 NEW YORK TIMES

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