Motoyuki Shibata teaches American literature and literary translation at the University of Tokyo. He received a Kodansha Essay Prize for Namahanka-na Gakusha (A Half-hearted Scholar), a Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities for The American Narcissus (2005), and in 2010 he received a Japanese Translation Cultural Award for his translation of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Among contemporary authors he has translated are Paul Auster, Steven Millhauser, Richard Powers, Stuart Dybek and Steve Erickson. He co-edits with Ted Goossen Monkey Business, an annual journal of Japanese literature in English, the third issue of which has just come out.
