Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka painted for years before she wrote a word of fiction. Born in Palo Alto in 1962 to an aerospace engineer and a laboratory technician, she took her degree in art at Yale in 1984, kept painting until she was about thirty, then turned to fiction and finished an MFA at Columbia in 1999. Her three short novels form a loose sequence on Japanese American life. When the Emperor Was Divine (2002) draws on her grandfather's arrest after Pearl Harbor and her family's years in a wartime camp. The Buddha in the Attic (2011) speaks in the first person plural for the picture brides shipped to California, and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and France's Prix Femina étranger. The Swimmers (2022) opens with the anonymous regulars of a lap pool whose routine ends when a crack appears in the floor, then follows one of them, Alice, through dementia into a memory care facility. Otsuka's own mother had Pick's disease and died in 2015. The book took the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.