The Beast Player

Nahoko Uehashi is a Japanese fantasy author who won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 2014. She is best known in the English-speaking world for the Moribito series (translated by Cathy Hirano), a sequence of fantasy novels set in a richly imagined Asian-influenced world, following Balsa, a wandering spearwoman, as the bodyguard of the young Prince Chagum. Uehashi trained as a cultural anthropologist, and her fantasy worlds reflect deep research into pre-modern societies and their social structures, religious practices, and ecosystems. Read more →