Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa is a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose haunting, psychologically precise fiction has earned her a devoted international readership. Born in Okayama in 1962, she studied at Waseda University and won the Akutagawa Prize (Japan's most prestigious literary award for emerging writers) for her 1991 novella The Pregnancy Diary. Ogawa has published over forty works of fiction and non-fiction in Japanese. The Memory Police, set on an unnamed island where objects and concepts are systematically disappeared by a totalitarian regime, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize when it was translated into English. Her fiction is characterised by its quiet, unsettling atmosphere, its precise observation of the strange within the ordinary, and its exploration of memory, loss, and erasure. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers some of the most distinctive and haunting fiction in contemporary literature — novels where the everyday becomes uncanny and the loss of memory becomes a metaphor for everything we cannot hold on to.