Award-winning Japanese writer to speak at URI

KINGSTON, R.I. -- March 31, 1999 -- Yoko Tawada, an internationally acclaimed Japanese writer, will provide a trilingual reading of her work in English, German and Japanese at the University of Rhode Island on April 14 at 7 p.m. The reading will be followed by a discussion on living and writing between cultures.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by URI,s Honors Program and Visiting Scholars Committee, and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literature. It takes place at the Multicultural Center on Lower College Road.

In 1993, Tawada received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, Japan,s equivalent of a Booker or a Pulitzer, for her book, The Bridegroom Was a Dog. She is currently a writer in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Born in Tokyo and educated at Waseda University, Tawada now lives in Germany. Her first book, Missing Heels, won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991. She won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award to foreign writers for their contributions to German culture, in 1996. She was also awarded the Lessing Prize in 1994 and the Prize in Literature from the City of Hamburg in 1990.

Tawada,s fiction and poetry have been featured in journals and anthologies in France, Holland, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. She has also written and produced works for the stage.