Born in Japan, Mieko Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006. Her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World (2007) was awarded the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers. In 2008, Kawakami published Breasts and Eggs as a novella and won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. In 2016, she was selected as Granta Best of Young Japanese Novelist. Kawakami has also written novels Heaven and the newly expanded Breasts and Eggs, her first novel to be published in English. She lives in Tokyo.