Liza Dalby

With its fascinating story of characters caught up in a world they themselves don't understand, Hidden Buddhas may well be Liza Dalby's best work yet. Besides taking us on a journey through little-known corners of Japan, it offers us an engaging and believable portrait of people driven to do things they may not have imagined." --Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

According to esoteric Buddhist theology, the world is suffering through a final corrupt era. Many in Japan believe that after the world ends, the Buddha of the Future will appear and bring about a new age of enlightenment. Hundreds of temples in Japan are known to keep mysterious hidden buddhas secreted away except on rare designated viewing days. Are they being protected

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Mineko Iwasaki (born Masako Tanaka) is a Japanese businesswoman, author and former geisha. Iwasaki was the most famous geisha in Japan until her sudden retirement at the age of 29. Known for her performances for celebrity and royalty during her geisha life, Iwasaki was the heir apparent (atotori) to her geisha house (okiya) while she was just a young apprentice.
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Lesley Downer

I write historical fiction set in Japan - women’s untold stories, largely true and based on meticulous and detailed research, though primarily, of course, good yarns. I’ve just finished The Shogun’s Queen, the fourth of The Shogun Quartet, four novels set in the nineteenth century during the tumultuous fifteen years when Japan was convulsed by civil war and transformed from rule by the shoguns into a society that looked to the west.
Preorder: http://bit.ly/TheShogunsQueen
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Raynor Winn

After walking the South West Coast Path, Raynor Winn became a long distance walker and now writes about nature, homelessness and wild camping. She lives in Cornwall.

Follow Raynor on Twitter @raynor_winn
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Isak Dinesen

Pseudonym used by the Danish author Karen Blixen.

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (Danish: [kʰɑːɑn ˈb̥leɡ̊sn̩]; 17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), born Karen Christentze Dinesen, was a Danish author, also known by the pen name Isak Dinesen, who wrote works in Danish, French and English. She also at times used the pen names Tania Blixen, Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel.
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(wikipedia)
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Lucy Adlington

I am fascinated by the stories clothes can tell about the people who made, sold and wore them.
My latest non-fiction book is 'The Dressmakers of Auschwitz', revealing the lives and fates of a remarkable group of mainly Jewish women who sewed to survive in a fashion salon established by the camp commandant's wife. It has been a privilege to bring these stories into the light.
'Women's Lives & Clothes in WW2' is a global overview of the 1940s, drawing on interviews with veterans and items from my vintage collection.
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In between all this writing I give presentations on costume history - such a fabulous job: w
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Mieko Kawakami

Mieko Kawakami (川上未映子, born in August 29, 1976) is a Japanese singer and writer from Osaka.

She was awarded the 138th Akutagawa Prize for promising new writers of serious fiction (2007) for her novel Chichi to Ran (乳と卵) (Breasts and Eggs).

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Atsuhiro Yoshida

Japanese name: 吉田篤弘
A literary mainstay in Japan, Atsuhiro Yoshida is the author of over 40 books. He is also an innovative book designer and part of a creative design duo with his wife, Hiromi, under their company, Craft-Ebbing & Co. In 1994, the pair launched into the Japanese literary scene with an art exhibition featuring handcrafted covers for fictional books, gaining attention for their unconventional designs and thought-provoking titles. (Japan Times)
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Jake Adelstein

Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993 and low-ranking Zen Buddhist priest since 2017--and is unlikely to ever achieve satori. That's okay. He's considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in Japan and works as a writer and consultant in Japan, the United States and France. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: A Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (Vintage) and has written two other books published by Marchialy in France.

𝗝’𝗔𝗜 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗨 𝗠𝗢𝗡 𝗔̂𝗠𝗘 𝗘𝗡 𝗕𝗜𝗧𝗖𝗢𝗜𝗡𝗦 (I Sold My Soul For Bitcoins) 2019
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Ruth Goodman

Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian working with museums, theatre, television and educational establishments. She has presented (and consulted on) several highly successful television series including “The Edwardian Farm”, “The Victorian Farm”, “Victorian Farm Christmas” “Tales from the Green Valley” and “The Victorian Pharmacy” (all for primetime BBC Two) as well as presenting a variety of films for The One Show and Coast. “The Victorian Farm” was one of BBC Two’s biggest hits in 2009 and was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award. The book of the series, also called “The Victorian Farm” went to No. 1 in The Sunday Times’s best seller list. These were followed by The Wartime Farm which regularly attracted up to 3 millio
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Philip Matyszak

Philip Matyszak is a British nonfiction author, primarily of historical works relating to ancient Rome. Matyszak has a doctorate in Roman history from St. John's College, Oxford. In addition to being a professional author, he also teaches ancient history for Madingley Hall Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge University.
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Ruth Benedict

Ruth Fulton Benedict, noted anthropologist, studied Native American and Japanese cultures.

Ruth Fulton Benedict, a folklorist, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909.

She entered graduate school at Columbia University in 1919 under Franz Boas. She received her Philosophiae Doctor and joined the faculty in 1923. She perhaps shared a romantic relationship with Margaret Mead, and Marvin Opler ranked among her colleagues.

Work of Ruth Fulton Benedict clearly evidences point of view of Franz Boas, her teacher, mentor, and the father. The passionate humanism of Boas, her mentor, affected affected Ruth Benedict, who continued it in her research and writing.

Ruth Fulton Benedict held the post of president of the association and also a promi
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Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima (三島由紀夫) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima
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Lesley Downer

I write historical fiction set in Japan - women’s untold stories, largely true and based on meticulous and detailed research, though primarily, of course, good yarns. I’ve just finished The Shogun’s Queen, the fourth of The Shogun Quartet, four novels set in the nineteenth century during the tumultuous fifteen years when Japan was convulsed by civil war and transformed from rule by the shoguns into a society that looked to the west.
Preorder: http://bit.ly/TheShogunsQueen
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Buy books on Amazon
Alex Kerr

Born in 1952, he's an American writer and Japanologist that has lived in Japan since 1977.

Librarian note: There are other authors with the same name. To see the English historian go to Alex Kerr.
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Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown is a prolific American writer, most known for her mysteries and other novels (Rubyfruit Jungle). She is also an Emmy-nominated screenwriter.

Brown was born illegitimate in Hanover, Pennsylvania. She was raised by her biological mother's female cousin and the cousin's husband in York, Pennsylvania and later in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Starting in the fall of 1962, Brown attended the University of Florida at Gainesville on a scholarship. In the spring of 1964, the administrators of the racially segregated university expelled her for participating in the civil rights movement. She subsequently enrolled at Broward Community College[3] with the hope of transferring eventually to a more tolerant four-year institution.

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Stephen R. Donaldson

Stephen Reeder Donaldson is an American fantasy, science fiction, and mystery novelist; in the United Kingdom he is usually called "Stephen Donaldson" (without the "R"). He has also written non-fiction under the pen name Reed Stephens.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION:

Stephen R. Donaldson was born May 13, 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, James, was a medical missionary and his mother, Ruth, a prosthetist (a person skilled in making or fitting prosthetic devices). Donaldson spent the years between the ages of 3 and 16 living in India, where his father was working as an orthopaedic surgeon. Donaldson earned his bachelor's degree from The College of Wooster and master's degree from Kent State University.

INSPIRATIONS:

Donaldson's work is heavily inf
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Junji Itō (Japanese: 伊藤潤二, Ito Junji) is a Japanese cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his horror manga.
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His comics are celebrated for their finely depicted body horrors, while also retaining some elements of psychological horror and erotism.
Although he mostly produces short stories, Ito is best known for his longer comic series: Tomie (1987-2000), about a beautiful high school girl who inspires her
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Murasaki Shikibu

Murasaki Shikibu (Japanese: 紫式部), born around 978 in Heian-kyō (modern-day Kyoto), is widely celebrated as one of the most important and pioneering figures in Japanese literature. Though her real name is not definitively known, she is remembered by the sobriquet “Murasaki Shikibu,” a name derived from a combination of her most famous literary character, Murasaki, and her father’s official court position in the Bureau of Ceremonial (Shikibu-shō). This alias reflects both her literary contribution and her aristocratic lineage.
She was born into the prestigious Fujiwara family, though to a lesser branch that did not hold the most powerful positions in court. Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, was a scholar, poet, and provincial governor. Recogni
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Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe was an English novelist, journalist, merchant, pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations. He has been seen as one of the earliest proponents of the English novel, and helped to popularise the form in Britain with others such as Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson. Defoe wrote many political tracts, was often in trouble with the authorities, and spent a period in prison. Intellectuals and political leaders paid attention to his fresh ideas and sometimes consulted him.
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Mineko Iwasaki (born Masako Tanaka) is a Japanese businesswoman, author and former geisha. Iwasaki was the most famous geisha in Japan until her sudden retirement at the age of 29. Known for her performances for celebrity and royalty during her geisha life, Iwasaki was the heir apparent (atotori) to her geisha house (okiya) while she was just a young apprentice.
American author Arthur Golden interviewed her for background information when writing his 1997 book, Memoirs of a Geisha. Iwasaki later regretted interviewing for Golden, having cited a breach of confidentiality, and later sued and settled out of court with Golden for the parallelism between his book and her life. In 2002, she released her own autobiography, titled Geisha of Gion in
Buy books on Amazon
John Banville

William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W.B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.
Banville has won the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinqu
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Suzannah Lipscomb

Prof Suzannah Lipscomb is Professor Emerita in History at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII, A Visitor's Companion to Tudor England, The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII, Witchcraft, and The Voices of Nimes: Women, Sex and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc. She edited, with Helen Carr, What is History, Now? (out 2021). She also writes and presents television programmes, including series on Henry VIII and his Six Wives, Witches: A Century of Murder, and Elizabeth I; hosts the podcast Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, and writes a regular column for History Today.
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Tracy Borman

Tracy Borman, PhD, FRHistS, FSA is a historian and author from Scothern, United Kingdom. She is most widely known as the author of Elizabeth's Women.

Borman was born and brought up in the village of Scothern, England near Lincoln. She was educated at Scothern Primary School (now Ellison Boulters School), William Farr School, Welton, and Yarborough School, Lincoln. She taught history at the University of Hull, where she was awarded a Ph.D in 1997. Elizabeth's Women was serialized and became a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week in September 2009. Tracy Borman appeared on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, also in September 2009
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Eric Lomax

Lomax was a British Army officer who was sent to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1942. He is most famous for writing a book, The Railway Man, on his experience before, during, and after World War II, which won the 1996 NCR Book Award and the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.
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Christopher L. Hayes

Christopher Hayes is Editor at Large of The Nation and host of Up w/ Chris Hayes on MSNBC. From 2010 to 2011, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, and The Guardian. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Kate and daughter Ryan.

Author photo credit: Sarah Shatz
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Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.

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