Eriko Tsugawa-Madden is from Kushiro City in Hokkaido, in northernmost Japan. She has written poetry and short stories in Japanese, from her teens. She moved to Ireland in 1989, and ten years later began writing poetry in English for the first time. She was a finalist in the Hennessy Literary Awards in 2003, for those earliest poems in English. Her first book of poetry Bride of the Wind (Japan, 2014, Kinseido Press) was a bilingual English/Japanese collection. Some of her work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and other poetry magazines and journals. She contributed to the poetry anthologies: Landing Places (2010), Writing Home (2019) and Local Wonders (2021), all from Dedalus Press. In 2022, she received the 55th Oguma poetry award in Japan for her self-published bilingual poetry collection, Lull in the Rain (2021). In the same year, she also won the Hokkaido Newspaper literary award for her short story, ‘Oni’. Following the 2022 award, Lull in the Rain was re-published in 2024 by Mitsui Publishing.

Chasing the Clouds (Dedalus Press, 2026) draws on her two previous collections and also includes a section of new poems.

Author photo by Pat Boran