The Japan Times wraps up its year-long tribute to translators by focusing on newcomer Morgan Giles, 33, whose poetic translation of Yu Miri’s “Tokyo Ueno Station” won the National Book Award for translated literature in 2020. It was Giles’ first full-length work.
Her professional career as a translator may be just starting, but Giles has been translating Japanese literature since high school. She grew up in Richmond, Kentucky, near the first and largest Toyota Motors Manufacturing facility in North America, and her hometown is the sister city to the Yatsugatake region of Yamanashi Prefecture.
“There were a lot of Japanese people and Japan-related things around, growing up,” Giles says. Japanese culture coexisted with the Appalachian mountains of her childhood.