Julie Otsuka is an award-winning novelist born in Palo Alto, California. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale, she received an MFA in writing from Columbia University in 1999. She soon adapted her Master’s thesis into the first two chapters of her critically acclaimed debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (Knopf, 2002). Drawing on research, family history, and personal experience to paint a portrait of Japanese American incarceration camps during the Second World War, Emperor has since been assigned to incoming freshmen at more than sixty colleges and universities. 

Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf, 2011), was named winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger, the Albatros Literaturpreis, the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It was also selected as Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe, a Notable Book by the New York Times, and a Top Ten Book by Library Journal and Vogue. Her latest novel, The Swimmers (Knopf, 2022), won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Gregor Von Rezzori Award. Otsuka’s other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

https://www.julieotsuka.com/about