Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal is a British ceramicist and writer born in 1964 in Nottingham. He studied at Cambridge and became one of Britain's most distinguished studio potters, known particularly for his large installations of porcelain vessels. He is Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) is his first book, a family memoir tracing the history of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke — miniature carved objects — through the hands of his extended family, the Ephrussi banking dynasty of Vienna and Paris, across 150 years of European history and the Holocaust. It won the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Costa Biography Award, the Prix du meilleur livre étranger in France, and numerous other awards, becoming an international bestseller. His subsequent books include The White Road: A Pilgrimage of Sorts (2015), about the history of porcelain, and Letters to Camondo (2021), a meditation on a Jewish Parisian family's disappearance in the Holocaust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.