Susan Southard

Susan Southard is an American author and journalist. Her book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War (2015) is an account of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945 and its multi-decade aftermath, following five hibakusha—atomic bomb survivors—through the remainder of their lives. Southard spent more than a decade researching and writing the book, learning Japanese, and conducting interviews in Japan. Nagasaki won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction in 2016, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Studs and Ida Terkel Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. The book is praised for its meticulous historical research, its compassionate portraiture of its subjects, and its urgent relevance to contemporary debates about nuclear weapons. Southard's work represents a significant contribution to the literature of nuclear history and serves as a corrective to the relative neglect of Nagasaki compared to Hiroshima in American historical consciousness. She divides her time between the United States and Japan.