Mai Ishizawa

Mai Ishizawa (石沢麻依) is a Japanese novelist born in 1980 in Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture, who holds degrees in psychology and Western art history from Tohoku University and is pursuing a PhD in Renaissance art at Heidelberg University in Germany since 2017. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells (Kai ni tsuzuku basho nite), won both the 64th Gunzō Prize for New Writers and the 165th Akutagawa Prize in 2021, establishing her as a prominent voice exploring themes of memory, disaster, and displacement. German New Directions Publishing