Bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has received this 12 months’s Princess of Asturias Award for literature, the Spanish foundation that organizes the prizes stated Wednesday.
The Princess of Asturias Award jury praised the “uniqueness” of the 72-year-old Kyoto-born author’s essays, brief tales and novels, which have been translated into greater than 40 languages and bought thousands and thousands of copies.
The panel highlighted Murakami’s “capability to reconcile Japanese tradition and the legacy of Western tradition in an bold and revolutionary narrative.”
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It stated his work expressed a number of the nice themes and conflicts of our time, together with “loneliness, existential uncertainty, dehumanization in huge cities and terrorism.”
The panel lauded his capability to attraction to totally different generations via totally different genres, describing him as “one in every of modern literature’s main long-distance runners.”
Murakami has written a number of dozen books and has additionally translated works by authors similar to Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger and John Irving.
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami poses throughout a information convention on the Haruki Murakami Library on the Waseda College in Tokyo on Sept. 22, 2021. Japanese bestselling novelist Murakami has received the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for literature. (AP Picture/Eugene Hoshiko, File)
One in every of his first main successes was with “Norwegian Wooden” in 1987, which bought greater than 10 million copies and was translated in some 35 languages.
Other major novels embody “Kafka on the Shore,” “1Q84” and “After Darkish.”
His collections of brief tales “Blind Willow, Sleeping Girl” received the distinguished Frank O’Connor Worldwide Brief Story Award in 2006 and his brief story, “Drive My Automotive” impressed Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi´s Oscar-winning movie of the identical title.
The Asturias prize jury stated Murakami was an “unsettling” novelist influenced by Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Vargas Llosa and whose use of humor and surrealism didn’t stop him from coping with critical social issues and the protection of human values.
Murakami was chosen from amongst 37 candidates of various nationalities. Earlier winners embody Eire`s John Banville and U.S. author Richard Ford.
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The $52,600 award is one in every of eight prizes overlaying the humanities, communication, science, and different areas which can be handed out yearly by the muse.
The prizes are among the many most prestigious within the Spanish-speaking world. The awards ceremony takes place every October within the northern Spanish metropolis of Oviedo.