Hideo Levy
Ian Hideo Levy (born November 29, 1950) is an American-born writer who writes in Japanese. He was born in Berkeley, California, to a Polish-American mother and a Jewish father who was a diplomat. The family moved often: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States.
Levy studied at Princeton University, earning a BA in East Asian studies and a PhD on the Japanese poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro. He studied the Man’yōshū, and his English translation of it was a finalist for the 1982 National Book Award in Translation. Susumu Nakanishi was a mentor to him. He taught at Princeton and Stanford before moving to Tokyo.
Levy is considered one of the first Americans to write modern literature in Japanese. He won the Noma Literary New Face Prize in 1992 for A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard, becoming the first foreigner to receive the prize. In 1996 his story Tiananmen was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. He received the Japan Foundation Special Prize in 2007 for helping introduce Japanese literature to foreign readers, and he won the Yomiuri Prize in 2017.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 14:35 (CET).