Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki was born in 1956 in New Haven, Connecticut, to a Japanese mother and American father. She grew up between New England and Japan, studied at Smith College, and has lived in various places including Japan, New York, and Montana. She is an ordained Soto Zen Buddhist priest, a novelist, and an award-winning filmmaker. Ozeki's novels include My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), and A Tale for the Time Being (2013), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her fourth novel The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021), a metafictional story about a book that speaks to a grieving boy, won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022. Her fiction explores the intersections of art, nature, time, and human interconnection, reflecting both her Japanese heritage and her engagement with Buddhist philosophy and environmental ethics.