Bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami wins Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for literature
Bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has received this yr’s Princess of Asturias Award for literature, the Spanish foundation that organizes the prizes stated Wednesday.
The Princess of Asturias Award jury praised the “uniqueness” of the 72-year-old Kyoto-born author’s essays, brief tales and novels, which have been translated into greater than 40 languages and offered hundreds of thousands of copies.
The panel highlighted Murakami’s “means to reconcile Japanese tradition and the legacy of Western tradition in an formidable and progressive narrative.”
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It stated his work expressed some of the good themes and conflicts of our time, together with “loneliness, existential uncertainty, dehumanization in big cities and terrorism.”
The panel lauded his means to attraction to completely different generations via completely different genres, describing him as “one of contemporary literature’s major long-distance runners.”
Murakami has written a number of dozen books and has additionally translated works by authors similar to Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger and John Irving.
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami poses throughout a information convention on the Haruki Murakami Library on the Waseda University in Tokyo on Sept. 22, 2021. Japanese bestselling novelist Murakami has received the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for literature. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)
One of his first main successes was with “Norwegian Wood” in 1987, which offered greater than 10 million copies and was translated in some 35 languages.
Other major novels embrace “Kafka on the Shore,” “1Q84” and “After Dark.”
His collections of brief tales “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” received the distinguished Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2006 and his brief story, “Drive My Car” impressed Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi´s Oscar-winning movie of the identical identify.
The Asturias prize jury stated Murakami was an “unsettling” novelist influenced by Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Vargas Llosa and whose use of humor and surrealism didn’t forestall him from coping with severe social issues and the protection of human values.
Murakami was chosen from amongst 37 candidates of various nationalities. Previous winners embrace Ireland`s John Banville and U.S. author Richard Ford.
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The $52,600 award is one of eight prizes masking the humanities, communication, science, and different areas which can be handed out yearly by the inspiration.
The prizes are among the many most prestigious within the Spanish-speaking world. The awards ceremony takes place every October within the northern Spanish metropolis of Oviedo.