Arthur Binard

Arthur Binard was born in 1967 in Michigan (USA). He studied English literature at Colgate University, and after graduation, an interest in the ideogram led him to Japan where he writes in both English and Japanese. His first book of poems in Japanese, “Tsuriagetewa,” was awarded the Nakahara Chūya Prize in 2001. The following year, the collection was published in English under the title “Catch and Release.” Binard won the Japan Picture Book Prize in 2007 for “Home is Here” (Koko ga ie da), his retelling of the story of the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing vessel whose twenty-three crew members were exposed to radiation from a hydrogen bomb test in the South Pacific. Binard’s English translations of the popular Family of Fourteen picture-book series are available from Doshinsha Publishers.