Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960. She was educated at Waseda University and has lived in Germany since 1982. She writes in both German and Japanese and was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1993 for her short story The Bridegroom Was a Dog. In 1996, she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. In 2005, she was awarded the Goethe Medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany. English translations of her fiction include The Bridegroom Was a Dog (Kodansha International, 1998), Where Europe Begins (New Directions, 2002), Facing the Bridge (New Directions, 2007), and The Naked Eye (New Directions, 2009).