SAYAKA MURATA

Sayaka Murata (b. 1979) was born and raised in Chiba, east of Tokyo. She stands at the forefront of a generation of younger Japanese writers who write about conformity, family life, work, and gender. Murata studied at Tawagawa University in Tokyo while working part-time at a convenience store. She continued to work there even after she became a successful author.



Murata released her first novel, Junyū (Breastfeeding), in 2003, for which she received the Gunzo Prize for debutants. She achieved international recognition with the novel Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen, 2016, translated into Norwegian in 2020), about 36-year-old Keiko, who has never quite fit in but has found her place working at a convenience store in Tokyo, something her family and friends, who want her to settle down, cannot accept. Convenience Store Woman has been translated into more than 40 languages and sold over one million copies worldwide. In 2018, she came out with the novel Earthlings (translated into Norwegian in 2023), which is about Natsuki, who has been abused and chooses to completely withdraw from society as an adult.



Murata has published twelve novels so far and won all the major book prizes in her home country, including the Mishima Yukio Prize (2013), the Noma Prize for Literature (2009), and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for Convenience Store Woman. She lives in Tokyo.