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 published dozens of books--stories, novels, poems, plays, essays--in each language. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes eight of her books, including The Emissary, which won the inaugural National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2018.
