| Hideo Levy | |
| Birth Name: | Ian Hideo Levy |
| Birth Date: | 29 November 1950 |
| Birth Place: | Berkeley, California |
| Occupation: | Writer |
| Language: | Japanese |
| Nationality: | American |
| Awards: | |
is an American-born Japanese language author. Levy was born in California and educated in Taiwan, the US, and Japan. He is one of the first Americans to write modern literature in Japanese, and his work has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary prizes.
Levy was born in Berkeley, California, on 29 November 1950 to a Polish-American mother and a Jewish father.[1] His father named him after a friend who was imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II.[2] 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.[3] He has referred to the Man'yōshū scholar Susumu Nakanishi as his mentor.[4] After working as an assistant professor at Princeton, he moved to Stanford University and taught there. He later left and moved to Tokyo.[5]
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. In 1996, his story Tiananmen was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. For his contributions to the introduction of Japanese literature to foreign readers, he was honored with a Japan Foundation Special Prize in 2007. In 2017, he won the Yomiuri Prize.[6]