Mieko Kawakami

Mieko Kawakami is a Japanese novelist and poet, born in Osaka on 29 August 1976. She began her career as a singer and poet before publishing her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, in 2007, and won the 138th Akutagawa Prize the following year for Chichi to Ran.

Her 2019 novel Natsu Monogatari, an expanded reworking of that novella, was translated into English as Breasts and Eggs and brought her an international readership. Heaven, All the Lovers in the Night, Ms Ice Sandwich and Sisters in Yellow have also appeared in English.

Her fiction returns repeatedly to the body, class, and the interior lives of women in contemporary Japan. She lives in Tokyo.