Japanese · b. 1968
Yu Miri is a Japanese-born writer of Korean descent, part of the Zainichi Korean community in Japan. She began in theatre, founding the company Seishun Gogatsu-to as a teenager, and later turned to fiction. Her novels and plays deal with family breakdown, isolation, discrimination and the lives of people on the margins. She won the Akutagawa Prize in 1997 for Kazoku Cinema (Family Cinema). Her other works include Gold Rush, Hachigatsu no Kamigami and Midnight Sun, and she has also written nonfiction about the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, after which she moved to Minamisoma in Fukushima Prefecture. Her novel Tokyo Ueno Station, translated by Morgan Giles, follows the ghost of a homeless man in Ueno Park and won the 2020 US National Book Award for Translated Literature. Her work has brought wider English-language attention to Zainichi writing and to people who are often left out of Japan's national story.