Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Julie Otsuka is the author of the novels When the Emperor Was Divine, winner of the Asian American Literary Award and the American Library Association Alex Award, and The Buddha in the Attic, an international bestseller and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Prix Femina étranger, the Albatros Literaturpreis and a finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of The Swimmers. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, she lives in New York City, where she writes every afternoon in her neighborhood café.
Julie Otsuka's website
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What was your inspiration for setting the novel, When the Emperor Was
Divine, in the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during World War II?
Quite truthfully, I never set out to write a novel about the internment
camps. I started out writing—or trying to write—comedy, in fact, and never
thought of myself as a "serious" writer. But images of the war kept
surfacing in my work, so for reasons I didn't quite understand, the war was
something I needed to write about.
The obvious inspiration for the novel is my own family's history. My
grandfather was arrested by the FBI the day after Pearl Harbor and incarcerated
in various camps administered by the Department of Justice for "dangerous
enemy aliens." My mother, my uncle and my grandmother were interned for three
and a half years in Topaz, Utah.
My grandfather died when I was quite young, so I don't remember much about
him, but one day, several years ago, we found a box in my grandmother's house.
Inside the box were letters and postcards my grandfather had written to his wife
and children during the war. My mother read them first and I remember her
telling me afterwards, "It's like reading a story," and it was, but a
rather one-...
Tash Aw was born in Taipei to Malaysian parents. He grew up in Kuala Lumpur before moving to Britain to attend university. He is the author of three critically acclaimed novels – The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), which ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
When The Emperor was Divine
Try:
Map of the Invisible World
by Tash Aw
Author of three New York Times best-sellers and three collections of short stories, a children's book (another coming in 2022) and a ground-breaking collection of essays. Bloom has been a nominee for both the National Book ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Swimmers
Try:
In Love
by Amy Bloom
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