Hideo Levy

His father named him after a friend who was imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Levy's father was a diplomat, and the family moved around between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States. He graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in East Asian studies, and later received his doctorate from the same school for studying the poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro.

While at Princeton, Levy studied the Man'yōshū. His English translation of the text was one of the finalists of the 1982 U.S. National Book Award in the Translation category. He has referred to the Man'yōshū scholar Susumu Nakanishi as his mentor. After working as an assistant professor at Princeton, he moved to Stanford University and taught there. He later left and moved to Tokyo.

Levy gained attention in Japan as the first foreigner to win the Noma Literary Award for New Writers, which he received in 1992 for his work A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard.

Recognition 1st Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature for his English translation of Man'yōshū, 1979. 14th Noma Literary New Face Prize, 1992 Japan Foundation Award, 2007 68th Yomiuri Prize, 2017

Works

Novels

Literary criticism and essays

Man'yōshū scholarship Hitomaro and the Birth of Japanese Lyricism (Princeton University Press 1984) The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of the Man Yoshu, Japan's Premier Anthology of Classical Poetry (Princeton Library of Asian Translations) (Princeton University Press 1987) Love Songs from the Man'yoshu (Kodansha International 2000) Man'yo Luster (Pie Books 2002)

Translations Otohiko Kaga's