Tawada Yoko is a Japanese-German author who grew up in Japan and lives in Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German, having learned the latter after moving to Hamburg in her 20s. She has been producing work for nearly 40 years and has won literary prizes in both Japan and Germany. Many literary folk reckon she will one day win the Nobel prize.
Ms Tawada regularly switches between writing in Japanese and German. In "The Naked Eye" she went so far as to alternate between the two within a single project, writing five sentences in German and translating them into Japanese, then writing five sentences in Japanese and translating them into German, until she was left with two translations of a book with no "original" version.
She describes herself as wanting "not to be a writer of this or that language in particular, but to fall into the poetic ravine between them." She coined the term "exophonic literature" to describe writing in which "a writer is going from the inside out", in contrast to so-called "immigrant literature".
"The Emissary", a dystopian novel set in Japan in the wake of a disaster, won America's National Book Award for translated literature in 2018. "Archipelago of the Sun" is the final volume of an acclaimed trilogy following a travelling band of multilingual friends searching for a lost homeland. An earlier novel, "Memoirs of a Polar Bear", is written from three bears' perspectives.
[Sir Stafford Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.