Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka is a Japanese American novelist whose novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011) won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2012 and the Prix Femina étranger in France. The novel uses a remarkable collective first-person plural voice to tell the story of Japanese mail-order brides who emigrate to California in the early twentieth century. Otsuka's debut novel When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), about a Japanese American family's experience of internment during World War II, was widely acclaimed and has become a staple of American high school and college curricula. Her third novel, The Swimmers (2022), about a woman with dementia and the underground swimming pool that sustained her, was a finalist for numerous awards. Otsuka was born in Palo Alto, California, and grew up in the Bay Area. She received her MFA from Columbia University and has taught writing there. Her work is distinguished by its formal innovation and its exploration of Japanese American history and identity.