Wendy Ella Wright
WRITER
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Wendy Ella Wright is a poet, literary translator and a Doctor of Philosophy whose 2007 thesis titled Intangible Gifts and its exegesis, “Japan, the Love Story and Myself”, is inspired by the Nobel Prize winning speech title of Kawabata Yasunari, “Japan the Beautiful and Myself” and also the Oe Kenzaburo Nobel Prize winning speech, “Japan, the Ambiguous and Myself”. In 2020 she has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Waseda University, Waseda Institute of Advanced Studies. At Oxford University, in 2019, at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, she presented her poetry and translations in the seminar “Letters of Japan”. Her first novel, “The Air of Tokyo”, is held in the Widener Library of Harvard University and at the Bodliean of Oxford. Wright has been a Fellow at the Australian National University Japan Institute, 2012-2014, when she taught from the Japanese Collection at the National Gallery of Australia. She graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Culture from Sophia University. Her first published poem appeared in the Tokyo Journal, while she was living in Kamakura, at age 23. She is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Iowa, Iowa International Writer’s Program. The Japanese artists she has interpreted for in the genres of dance, ceramics, installation art and theatre include Sankai Juku, Akaji Maro, Toshikazu Endo, Kishida Rio, Daisan Erotica, and she trained as an interpreter at the Asahi Kaisetsu Jigyo of the Kabuki-za and the National Theatre of Japan.
Wright first traveled to Japan by ocean liner with her family at the age of nine. She believes that being presented with a stage decoration cherry blossom branch at the Minami-za in Kyoto, has been one of the powerful creative defining moments of her life.
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