FILE – Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami poses for media members throughout a information convention on the college’s new worldwide home of literature often known as The Haruki Murakami Library on the Waseda College in Tokyo on Sept. 22, 2021. Japanese best-selling cult novelist Murakami has received the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for literature, the […]
MADRID (AP) — Bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has received this 12 months’s Princess of Asturias Award for literature, the Spanish basis 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 thousands and thousands of copies.
The panel highlighted Murakami’s “potential to reconcile Japanese custom and the legacy of Western tradition in an formidable and progressive narrative.”
It stated his work expressed a few of the nice themes and conflicts of our time, together with “loneliness, existential uncertainty, dehumanization in huge cities and terrorism.”
The panel lauded his potential to enchantment to completely different generations by completely different genres, describing him as “one in every of up to date literature’s main long-distance runners.”
Murakami has written a number of dozen books and has additionally translated works by authors resembling Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger and John Irving.
Considered one of his first main successes was with “Norwegian Wooden” in 1987, which offered greater than 10 million copies and was translated in some 35 languages.
Different main novels embrace “Kafka on the Shore,” “1Q84” and “After Darkish.”
His collections of brief tales “Blind Willow, Sleeping Girl” received the distinguished Frank O’Connor Worldwide Brief Story Award in 2006 and his brief story, “Drive My Automobile” impressed Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi´s Oscar-winning movie of the identical title.
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 stop him from coping with critical social issues and the protection of human values.
Murakami was chosen from amongst 37 candidates of various nationalities. Earlier winners embrace Eire`s John Banville and U.S. author Richard Ford.
The 50,000-euro award ($52,600) is one in every of eight prizes overlaying the humanities, communication, science, and different areas which might 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.
