We are delighted to report that Mutsuo Takahashi, whose On Two Shores: New and Selected Poems Dedalus published back in 2006 (and reissued only a few months ago in a handsome hardback edition) has been announced as the inaugural recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award, Japan, an award which “recognises distinguished contribution to literary relations between Ireland and Japan.”
Congratulations to Takahashi-san, and to his translators Mitsuko Ohno and Frank Sewell, and to Nobuaki Tochigi who contributed the book’s Introduction.
Mutsuo Takahashi’s On Two Shores was the first bilingual Japanese-English poetry book published in Ireland. It is a significant part of our own ongoing literary relations with Japan, which includes Irene de Angelis and Joseph Woods’ major anthology Our Shared Japan (2007), Mikiro Sasaki’s Sky Navigation Homeward (2019) and our forthcoming anthology of 100 classical Japanese poems, due later in 2020, from Nell Regan and James Hadley.
The full text of the announcement from the Embassy of Ireland in Japan may be found HERE.
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