Skip to main content
yoko-tawada
© Bernd Saemmer Staatskanzlei RLP
Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada (*1960) was born in Tokyo, Japan, and lives as a freelance writer in Berlin. Winner of many writing awards, she studied literature with a focus on Russian literature at Waseda University in Tokyo and has lived in Germany since 1982, where she first studied modern German literature at the University of Hamburg and then earned her doctorate at the University of Zurich under Sigrid Weigel. She publishes essays, prose, plays and poetry in German and Japanese. She draws inspiration for her poetic work from her fascination with the German language and its linguistic differences to Japanese. Tawada's inexhaustible wonder at the foreign sounds and grammar of German keeps providing her with fresh new perspectives on the language. She artfully weaves this in-between-two-languages into her texts, in which her seemingly small stories delve into major themes of life.

Date:
Further Information