Shun Medoruma

Shun Medoruma is a Japanese writer, who, along with Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, Sakiyama Tami, and Matayoshi Eiki, is one of the most important contemporary writers from Okinawa, Japan. Early in his career he won the 11th Ryukyu Shimpō Short Story Prize in 1983 for "Taiwan Woman: Record of a Fish Shoal" ("Gyogunki"), translated by Shi-Lin Loh in Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa, and the New Okinawan Literature Prize in 1986 for "Walking the Street Named Peace Boulevard". He was awarded the 27th Kyushu Arts Festival Literary Prize and the 117th Akutagawa Prize in 1997 for his short story "A Drop of Water" ("Suiteki"). In 2000 his short story "Mabuigumi" won the prestigious Kawabata Yasunari and Kiyama Shōhei literary prizes. Medoruma also wrote the screenplay for the film Fūon:The Crying Wind, which received the Montreal Film Festival Innovation Prize in 2004, and published a novel based on the screenplay the same year. His critically acclaimed novel In the Woods of Memory is the first full-length novel by an Okinawan writer to be translated and published in English.