Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, educated at Waseda University, and has lived in Germany since 1982, where she received her Ph.D. in German literature. She made her debut as a writer with Missing Heels, which was awarded the Gunzō Prize for New Writers in 1991. In 1993, she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize – Japan's equivalent of a Booker or a Pulitzer – for The Bridegroom Was a Dog (published in English by Kodansha International in 1998). Ms. Tawada writes in both German and Japanese, and in 1996, she won the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize, a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture. She also received the Prize in Literature from the City of Hamburg (1990), the Lessing Prize (1994), and on March 22, 2005, on the 173rd anniversary of Goethe’s death, the Goethe-Medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded by the Goethe-Institut. Ms. Tawada’s fiction, poetry, and essays have been featured in journals and anthologies not only in Japan and Germany, but also in France, China, Italy, Holland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. She has also written and produced works for the stage. Where Europe Begins, a collection of stories translated from both German and Japanese, was published by New Directions in 2002. Ms. Tawada's new book in English, Facing The Bridge, will be published in Spring 2007. Her bio-bibliography is available at www.tawada.com.

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