Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She studied art as an undergraduate at Yale University, and pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at the age of thirty. She received her MFA in fiction at Columbia University in 1999. Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, is based on Otsuka’s own family history. The FBI arrested her grandfather, a suspected spy for Japan, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed (1941), and her mother, uncle, and grandmother spent three years at the Topaz internment camp. Nearly ten years after the publication of her first novel, Otsuka published The Buddha in the Attic, which is about a group of young Japanese women who sailed to America in the early 1900s to become the wives of men they have never met. Otsuka currently lives in New York City and spends almost every afternoon writing and reading at her neighborhood café.