Yōko Ogawa

Ogawa was born in Okayama and studied at Waseda University; an early fascination with her engineer father's world of numbers later surfaced in The Housekeeper and the Professor, her novel about a mathematician whose memory resets every eighty minutes. She won the Kaien Prize for new writers with her debut novella and the Akutagawa Prize in 1991 for Pregnancy Diary.

The Memory Police, first published in Japanese in 1994 and only later translated, imagines an island where the state decrees objects out of existence along with everyone's memory of them, and hunts down those who still remember: a quiet dystopia shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020.

Extraordinarily prolific, she has published more than forty novels and story collections, many turning ordinary domestic settings (a kitchen, a swimming pool, a museum) into settings for calm, encroaching horror.