Sonoko Machida
Photo: © Osamu Hoshikawa
Sonoko Machida won the influential Japan Booksellers’ Award in 2021 with her much-loved novel 52-Hertz Whales, retitled in English as The Woman, the Boy and the Whale, which has sold over one million copies in Japan alone and was made into powerful and hugely acclaimed film. This translation into English by Sam Bett is long awaited. Born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1980, Sonoko Machida graduated from school to become a hairdresser. While in her twenties, she realized she had a strong wish to write stories. Her most recent book to be translated into English is The Convenience Store by the Sea.
Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. A winner of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize, he has translated work by Osamu Dazai, Izumi Suzuki, Yukio Mishima, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Mieko Kawakami, including books shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the International Booker Prize. As the translator of The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, he was awarded a CWA Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation. Sam is also a recipient of the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs.
