© Fumiya Sawa

BANANA YOSHIMOTO is the author of the international bestseller Kitchen. She was born in Tokyo in 1964 and graduated from Nihon University College of Art, where she majored in literature. She debuted as a writer in 1987 with Kitchen, a novella that won her the Kaien Newcomer Writers Prize. In 1988, Moonlight Shadow, her thesis story, was awarded the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature. Then, in 1989, she received two accolades: the Recommendation by the Minister of Education’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists for Kitchen and Utakata/Sanctuary, and the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize for Goodbye Tsugumi. In 1995, she won the Murasaki Shikibu Prize for Amrita, a full-length novel. And in 2000, Furin to Nambei, a collection of stories set in South America, received the Bunkamura Deux Magots Literary Prize. Her works have been translated and published in more than thirty countries, and she has won several awards outside of Japan. In Italy, she won the Scanno Literary Prize in 1993, the Fendissime Literary Prize in 1996, the Maschera d’Argento Prize in 1999, and the Capri Award in 2011. You can follow her on Instagram at @bananayoshimoto2017.

ASA YONEDA was born in Osaka and studied language, literature, and translation at the University of Oxford and SOAS University of London. Her translation works include Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto and The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya. She lives in Bristol, U.K.