Asako Serizawa
Photo by Matthew Modica
Bio
Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and raised in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. Her debut book of fiction, Inheritors, won the PEN/Open Book Award and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, was a Massachusetts Book Awards Honors Book, and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. A graduate of Tufts University, Brown University, and Emerson College, she has received two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She currently lives in Boston. Spanish and Korean translations of Inheritors are forthcoming.
I’m working on a loose, perhaps unconventional, tetralogy revolving around Japanese imperialism and the Second World War. For myriad reasons, common and specific, my first book took over 12 years to write; at the frontier of the second book—a novel very much in its nascent phases—time, an old presence, is revealing a new face. I’m full of gratitude for this fellowship; for its existence as an option; for the research and travel it will grant. Its arrival was utterly unexpected and propitious, bolstering the first passages forward.