Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka ( born May 15, 1962 in Palo Alto, California) is an American writer.

Life

Julie Otsuka was born as the daughter of an air and space engineer and a laboratory assistant in Palo Alto. Both her parents are of Japanese descent and she has two brothers. After her high school graduation she studied art at Yale University, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1984. Subsequently, she worked for several years as a painter. With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship she could do her Masters at Columbia University in 1999. Then she published in 2002 with When the Emperor What Divine her first novel. Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic was translated into German by Katja Scholtz and the Mare Verlag under the title What we published dreamed.

Otsuka was awarded among others with an Asian American Literary Award in 2012 and the PEN / Faulkner Award and the Prix Femina Etranger.

Works

• When the Emperor what Divine ( 2002)
• The Buddha in the Attic (2011) What we dreamed, Mare 2012, ISBN 978-3-86648-179-4