Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University she pursued a career as a painter for several years before later turning to writing. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Her first novel, "When the Emperor Was Divine," was a winner of the 2003 American Library Association Alex Award.

Her second novel, "The Buddha in the Attic," is winner of the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. "The Buddha in the Attic" was an international bestseller and the winner of the prestigious Prix Femina étranger 2012, and the Albatros Literaturpreis 2013.

Otsuka's third novel, "The Swimmers," was published by A.A. Knopf in 2022, and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2023.

Otsuka is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, Newsweek, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and has been read aloud on PRI’s “Selected Shorts” and BBC Radio 4’s “Book at Bedtime.” She lives in New York City, where she writes every afternoon in her neighborhood café.