Banana Yoshimoto is the pen name of the contemporary Japanese writer Mahoko Yoshimoto. Born in Tokyo in 1964, Banana Yoshimoto graduated from the Nihon University College of Art, where she majored in Literary Arts. Her debut, “Kitchen”, won the Kaien Newcomer Writer’s Prize in 1987. She also won the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature in 1988 for “Moonlight Shadow”, the Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts for “Transient/Sanctuary” and the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize for “Goodbye Tsugumi” in 1989. In 1995, her novel “Amrita” won the Murasaki Shikibu Literary Prize while “Adultery and South America” was awarded the Bunkamura Les Deux Magots Literature Award in 2000, and “Miton to Fubin” was awarded the Tanizaki Junichiro Prize, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Japan, in 2022.
Yoshimoto’s works have been translated and published in over 30 countries. Her Italian awards include the Premio Scanno in 1993, the Premio Fendissime (for artists under 35) in 1996, the Machera d’Argento in 1999, and the Premio Capri in 2011