Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada is a Japanese and German writer who writes in Japanese and German.

She studied at Waseda University, majoring in Russian literature, and then, from 1982, in Hamburg, where she studied contemporary German literature. She received her doctorate in philology from the University of Zurich (2000). She has lived in Berlin since 2006.

She made her debut with a bilingual collection of poems and prose, Wherever You Are, There Is Nothing but Air (1987). She works as a poet, prose writer, and playwright, and often collaborates with artists and musicians. The contemporary Austrian composer Peter Ablinger wrote an opera based on her libretto.