Donald Lawrence Keene was an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. Keene was University Professor emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for over fifty years. Soon after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, he retired from Columbia, moved to Japan permanently, and acquired citizenship under the name Kīn Donarudo. This was also his poetic pen name and occasional nickname, spelled in the ateji form 鬼怒鳴門.
Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, self-rendered in 1894 as "Daisetz", was a Japanese essayist, philosopher, religious scholar, translator, and writer. He was a scholar and author of books and essays on Buddhism, Zen and Shin that were instrumental in spreading interest in both Zen and Shin to the West. Suzuki was also a prolific translator of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and Sanskrit literature. Suzuki spent several lengthy stretches teaching or lecturing at Western universities, and devoted many years to a professorship at Ōtani University, a Japanese Buddhist school.
Yōko Tawada is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German. Tawada has won numerous literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the Goethe Medal, the Kleist Prize, and a National Book Award.
Masao Abe was a Japanese Buddhist philosopher and religious studies scholar who was emeritus professor at Nara University. He is best known for his work in comparative religion, developing a Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue which later also included Judaism. His mature views were developed within the Kyoto School of philosophy. According to Christopher Ives: "Since the death of D. T. Suzuki in 1966, Masao Abe has served as the main representative of Zen Buddhism in Europe and North America."
John Weil Nathan is an American translator, writer, scholar, filmmaker, and Japanologist. His translations from Japanese into English include the works of Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburō Ōe, Kōbō Abe, and Natsume Sōseki. Nathan is also an Emmy Award-winning producer, writer and director of many films about Japanese culture and society and American business. He is Professor Emeritus of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are literary translators best known for their collaborative English translations of classic Russian literature. Individually, Pevear has also translated into English works from French, Italian, and Greek. The couple's collaborative translations have been nominated three times and twice won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Their translation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot also won the first Efim Etkind Translation Prize.
Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.
Ruth Ozeki is an American-Canadian author, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. Her books and films, including the novels My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021), seek to integrate personal narrative and social issues, and deal with themes relating to science, technology, environmental politics, race, religion, war and global popular culture. Her novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature.
Karen Brazell was an American professor and translator of Japanese literature. Her English language edition of The Confessions of Lady Nijō won a U.S. National Book Award in category Translation. She died in 2012 at the age of 73.
Minae Mizumura is a Japanese novelist. Among other literary awards, she has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize.
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.
Elizabeth Frank is an American novelist, biographer, art critic and translator. She has been a member of the literature faculty of Bard College since 1982 and is the Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Bard College. In 1986 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Louise Bogan: A Portrait. Frank is also the author of Jackson Pollock and the novel Cheat and Charmer, as well as the monographs Esteban Vicente and Karen Gunderson: The Dark World of Light. Her short story “Fires” is included in the anthology It Occurs to Me That I Am America. Along with co-translator Deliana Simeonova, she published translations from the Bulgarian of two novels about Jews in the twentieth century by Bulgarian novelist and screenwriter Angel Wagenstein: Farewell, Shanghai and Isaac’s Torah.
Takako Takahashi was a Japanese author. Her maiden name was Takako Okamoto.
Jeffrey Angles (ジェフリー・アングルス) is a poet who writes free verse in his second language, Japanese. He is also an American scholar of modern Japanese literature and an award-winning literary translator of modern Japanese poetry and fiction into English. He is a professor of Japanese language and Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. Among his awards are the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2009 for his translation of Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako by Tada Chimako and the 2017 Yomiuri Prize for Literature in the poetry category for his own Japanese-language poetry collection Watashi no hizukehenkosen.
Issa J. Boullata was a Palestinian scholar, writer, and translator of Arabic literature.
A True Novel is a novel by Japanese author Minae Mizumura. It is a loose retelling of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights set in post-World War II Japan. The novel was first serialized in the Japanese monthly literary journal Shinchō from January 2001 to January 2002. It was published in two volumes by Shinchosha in September 2002 and won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature in 2003. The English translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter was published in two volumes by Other Press in November 2013, as part of the Japanese Literature Publishing Project initiated by the Agency for Cultural Affairs. It won the Next Generation Indie Book Awards' Grand Prize in Fiction in 2014.
Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Jennifer Croft is an American author, critic and translator who translates works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. With the author Olga Tokarczuk, she was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights. In 2020, she was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her autofictional memoir Homesick.
Kyoko Nakajima is a Japanese writer. She has won the Naoki Prize, Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, Shibata Renzaburo Prize, Kawai Hayao Story Prize, and Chuo Koron Literary Prize, and her work has been adapted for film.
The Fall of Language in the Age of English is a Japanese non-fiction book by novelist Minae Mizumura. First published in 2008, the book argues that the Japanese language and Japanese literature are in decline, in part due to the influence of English as a global language, and in part due to failures in Japanese education. Mizumura's criticisms of contemporary Japanese literature and recommendation to eliminate compulsory English language education generated significant public controversy in Japan.
