With thanks, the judges for the 2026 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize are:

Fusako Innami

Dr. Fusako Innami is Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University as well as the author of Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (Michigan, 2021, Open Access). The book examines touch as the mediated experience of the memories of previous touching and the accumulation of sensations, all of which create an interstitial space between those in contact. In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated by engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive intellectual dialogues. The book received runner-up in the British Comparative Literature Association’s inaugural First Book Prize 2025. As an academic, dance reviewer, and practitioner, Fusako conducts dance workshops, “Touch,” to translate touch in literature back to moving bodies; and an ongoing international collaboration, “Translating Embodiedness,” to develop new methodologies for translating embodied practices across media.

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.

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.