Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita is an American author of Japanese descent whose fiction spans magical realism, political satire, and historical epic, bringing together Japanese American history, Brazilian immigration, and Los Angeles urban geography in dazzling and formally innovative narratives. Born in Oakland, California, in 1951, she spent nine years living in Brazil, an experience that deeply shaped her literary imagination. Yamashita's major novels include Brazil-Maru (1992), Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), Tropic of Orange (1997)—widely considered her masterpiece—and I Hotel (2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and chronicles the Asian American movement in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. Her work is celebrated for its formal ingenuity, its political passion, and its capacity to hold multiple languages, cultures, and historical timelines simultaneously. Yamashita received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2021, among numerous other honours including the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.