Writing Between Languages and Cultures: A Reading and Conversation with Yoko Tawada

Join us for a reading and conversation with the internationally renowned writer Yoko Tawada. Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, where she received a PhD in German literature, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture), the Tanizaki Prize, the Goethe Medal (an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany), and the prestigious Yomiurui Prize for Literature. New Directions has published her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, and her novel of Catherine Deneuve obsession, The Naked Eye, and a stand alone edition of her famous story, The Bridegroom Was a Dog.