Yoko Tawada was born Tokyo in 1960 and educated at Waseda University. She has lived in Germany since 1982. With her debut story “Missing Heels,” she was awarded the Gunzo Prize for new writers in 1991. In 1993 she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for the collection The Bridegroom Was a Dog, and in 1996 she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award to foreign writers recognized for their contribution to German culture. In 2005 she was honored with the Goethe Medaille, and in 2013 she received the Erlanger Literaturpreis. Tawada is also the author of Facing the Bridge, Where Europe Begins, The Naked Eye, and of more than thirty other works of fiction, poetry and drama.