Toshiyuki Horie

Toshiyuki Horie, a scholar of French literature, is a professor at Waseda University. After producing several translated works, he made his debut as an author in 1995 with Kogai e ('To the Suburbs'), going on to win the Mishima Yukio Prize and a number of other literary awards. As epitomized by his novel Kuma no shikiishi ('The Bear and the Paving Stone', translated into French as 'Le pavé de l'ours'), which won the Akutagawa Prize, his writing probes the area between truth and fiction, straddling the line between essays on his own experiences and purely fictional outings. In his works he carefully selects his words and meticulously arranges episodes and characters both famous and nameless, but manages never to rob his text of its elegant fluency. In 2003 he won the Kawabata Yasunari Prize for the short story Sutansu dotto ('Approach Dots'), and in 2004 the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize for the collection Yukinuma to sono shuhen ('Yukinuma and its Environs'). He has received the Yomiuri Prize for Literature twice: for his 2005 novel Kagan bojitsu sho ('Riverbank Days'), and for 2009's Seigen kyokusen ('Sine Curve') in the essay category.