Japanese - Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize

Japanese – Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation (GBSF) Translation Prize is an annual award for translations into English of full-length Japanese-language works of literary merit and general interest. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner-up is awarded £1,000.

Generously supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the prize will be awarded for the first time in February 2024.

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize is currently closed for submissions.
The prize will re-open for entries in 2026.

The 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize winner

Masaya Saito for a translation of The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs by Sanki Saitō (Isobar Press)

Photography © Natalie Thorpe

‘The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs is an astonishingly frank wartime testament by one of Japan’s preeminent poets, and a gripping portrait of the artist as an anti-war bohemian rebel. Detained as a leader of the ‘unpatriotic’ New Rising Haiku movement, Saito abandoned Tokyo and family respectability in the early 1940s to live in a grungy hotel in the cosmopolitan port of Kobe, among spies, drifters and bar hostesses. Besides liaisons amid air raids that killed most of the characters, he recalls a resented love child, his antipathy towards authority, and aesthetic renewal after the 1945 firebombing. Masaya Saito’s sparkling revision of his own translation made 30 years earlier recovers this masterpiece for a new generation.’

Maya Jaggi, 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize judge

The 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize runner-up

David Boyd for a translation of The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (Granta Publications)

Photography © Natalie Thorpe

‘In general, it is not an easy task to translate from Japanese to English as the languages and cultures are so far apart. It is even so, I imagine, when translating a piece like The Factory since the story is set in a peculiar world to the point we sometimes feel it is inscrutable. For this reason, it could be said that David Boyd has translated the untranslatable. So brilliantly. His attention to details is amazing and it is such an enjoyable piece to read.’

Nozomi Abe, 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize judge

The 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize shortlist

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell for a translation of Kappa by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (New Directions)

Brian Bergstrom for a translation of Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Kōhei Saitō (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group Ltd)

Alison Watts for a translation of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama (Doubleday, Penguin Random House)

Kendall Heitzman for a translation of Nails and Eyes by Kaori Fujino (Pushkin Press)

‘This year we even saw a broadening of genre with memoir and non-fiction titles sitting alongside fiction. While the judging was difficult, it was a pleasure to read all the submitted works, and I’m so pleased to see Japanese writing getting the attention it deserves in Britain.’

Nick Bradley, 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize judge

If you are interested in any of the books here please visit Bookshop.org.

With thanks, the judges for the 2025 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize are:

Lila Matsumoto:

Lila Matsumoto was born in Japan and grew up in the US. She has lived in the UK since 2007, and currently teaches poetry at the University of Nottingham. Lila was the editor of the poetry magazine SCREE and currently co-runs FRONT HORSE, a magazine and performance night of poetry, music, and art. “Urn and Drum” is her first full collection of poems.

Asa Yoneda:

Asa Yoneda’s work includes translations from Japanese of women and men from the contemporary to the early 20th century, and has been nominated for the PEN Translation Prize and the Otherwise Prize, among others. She teaches literary translation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Born in Osaka, she has lived in Tokyo, Southern California, and the south of England, most recently Bristol. Her English language translation of Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami is shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.

Dr Victoria Young:

Dr Victoria Young has a BA in Japanese Studies from the University of Cambridge (Trinity Hall) and an MA in Japanese Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College. She spent three and a half years at Waseda University in Tokyo as a research student in the then Institute for Ryukyuan and Okinawan Studies. She was awarded her Ph.D by the University of Leeds in 2016. Her thesis focused on works of literature by three writers: Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji, and Tawada Yōko. Most often associated with the categories of Okinawan, resident Korean (zainichi), and ‘transborder’ literature respectively, her research traced the multiple and intriguing ways in which these works of fiction reinscribe, transcend, and challenge the margins and borders of Japanese literature. She teaches at the University of Cambridge.

2023 (presented 2024)

Winner:

Alison Watts for a translation of The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase (Scribner, Simon and Schuster)

Runners-up:

David Boyd for a translation of Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada (Granta)
Sam Bett and David Boyd for a translation of All The Lovers In The Night by Mieko Kawakami (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

Shortlisted:

Sam Bett for a translation of The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai (New Directions)
Margaret Mitsutani for a translation of Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada (Granta)
Alison Watts for a translation of Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda (Bitter Lemon Press)

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation was established in 1985 as a non-governmental, non-profit making body with the purpose of helping to develop and sustain good relations between the United Kingdom and Japan. Its main objective is to promote among the people of both countries, in a global context, a mutual knowledge, understanding and appreciation of each other’s culture, society, and achievements.

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