Meet the Authors: SHIBASAKI Tomoka and Polly Barton

In celebration of Japanese literature in the UK, join us this March for this rare talk event with multiple award-winning author SHIBASAKI Tomoka and renowned Japanese literary translator Polly Barton. Fluently changing subject between third-person and first-person, SHIBASAKI’s first English-translated book, Spring Garden, is a poetic but foreboding narrative of Taro and his neighbour, NISHI, who holds an obsessive interest towards the old house next door.

In this special talk, Tomoka and Polly will discuss the dazzling novels Spring Garden and the newly translated A Hundred Years and a Day.

‘A master class in novel writing… Tomoka Shibasaki rightly won the Akutagawa Prize in 2014 for this sublime novella of dislocation and regret, and Polly Barton’s light, understated translation does it immense justice’ – Japan Times

SHIBASAKI Tomoka

SHIBASAKI Tomoka is a Japanese novelist. Her debut novel Kyō no dekigoto (A Day on the Planet) was adapted into a film by YUKISADA Isao in 2004. Her 2007 novel Sono machi no ima wa (That Town, Today) received multiple awards including the Geijutsu Sensho Newcomers Prize. In 2010, her novel Netemo sametemo (Whether Asleep or Awake) received the Noma Literary New Face Prize; the book was subsequently adapted for the screen by HAMAGUCHI Ryusuke as Asako I & II and screened at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

In 2014, SHIBASAKI won the Akutagawa Award for Spring Garden, translated into English by Polly Barton and published by Pushkin Press. Her 2023 novel Tsuzuki to hajimari (Continuing and Beginning) received the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize and the Tanizaki Junichiro Prize. Her 2018 work A Hundred Years and a Day was translated into English by Polly Barton and published by Stone Bridge Press in 2025. Her latest novel is Kaerenai tantei (The Detective Who Couldn’t Go Home), published in 2025.

Polly Barton

Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese literary translator. Her translations include A Hundred Years and a Day and Spring Garden by SHIBASAKI Tomoka, Butter by YUZUKI Asako, Hunchback by ICHIKAWA Saou, Where the Wild Ladies Are by MATSUDA Aoko, and Mild Vertigo by KANAI Mieko. She is the author of Fifty Sounds, Porn: An Oral History. Her debut novel What Am I, A Deer? comes out in April.