Mieko Kawakami

Overcoming Expectations: Mieko Kawakami on Breasts and Eggs

Mieko Kawakami and Madeleine Thien

Overcoming Expectations: Mieko Kawakami on Breasts and Eggs

Mieko Kawakami and Madeleine Thien

7:00pm

Saturday, October 24, 2020

45 mins

Award-winning Japanese poet and writer Mieko Kawakami published her first novel in English this year. Hear from the author of Breasts and Eggs, an exploration of identity and womanhood that awarded Kawakami with Japan’s most prestigious literary honour, the Akutagawa Prize.

Interviewer: Madeleine Thien

English captioning is available for this video. Please click the ‘CC’ button in the video toolbar to turn it on.

 

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The Japan Foundation, Toronto

Award-winning Japanese poet and writer Mieko Kawakami published her first novel in English this year. Hear from the author of Breasts and Eggs, an exploration of identity and womanhood that awarded Kawakami with Japan’s most prestigious literary honour, the Akutagawa Prize.

Interviewer: Madeleine Thien

English captioning is available for this video. Please click the ‘CC’ button in the video toolbar to turn it on.

 

Japan Foundation Toronto Logo
The Japan Foundation, Toronto

Featured Authors

Mieko Kawakami
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. 

Read more about Mieko Kawakami

Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, including Dogs at the Perimeter, and a story collection, Simple Recipes. Her most recent novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and The Folio Prize; and won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction. The novel was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2016 and long-listed for a Carnegie Medal. Madeleine's books have been translated into twenty-five languages and her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Brick, frieze, Granta and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal and is a Professor of English at Brooklyn College. 

Read more about Madeleine Thien

Mieko Kawakami

7:00pm

Saturday, October 24

45 mins

What to read

Breasts and Eggs by , Do Not Say We Have Nothing by ,
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