Mieko Kawakami

Born in Osaka prefecture in Japan, Mieko Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006. Her first novella My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, published in 2007, was awarded the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers. The following year, Kawakami published Breasts and Eggs as a novella, and won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. In 2016, she was selected as Granta Best of Young Japanese Novelist. Kawakami is also the author of the novels Heaven, All the Lovers in the Night, and the newly expanded Breasts and Eggs, her first novel to be published in English, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. One of her novellas, Ms Ice Sandwich, was also translated into English by Louise Heal Kawai. She lives in Tokyo.