Natsuko Imamura

Natsuko Imamura is a Japanese novelist born in Hiroshima in 1980, who now lives in Osaka. She made her literary debut with the 2010 Dazai Osamu Prize-winning novella "Atarashii Musume," and won the Akutagawa Prize in 2019 for "Murasaki no Sukato no Onna" (translated as "The Woman in the Purple Skirt"), on her third nomination.

Her other honors include the Mishima Yukio Prize, the Kawai Hayao Story Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. Her fiction, often compared to Sayaka Murata's for its dry humor and social observation, draws on jobs she herself held, including hotel housekeeping.