Hiromi Itō

Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Year of birth: 1955

Hiromi Itō rose to national prominence at the end of the 1970s with a strikingly fresh, colloquial style completely unlike the pedantic poetry that had previously dominated the postwar Japanese poetic scene. Since then, she has earned a reputation as a ‘shamanistic’ poet, whose work has the remarkable ability to channel voices from deep within the female body and the inner recesses of the national subconscious. She has won various literary prizes, including the Takami Jun prize for her long, epic, almost mythological poem Kawara arekusa (Wild Grass on the Riverbank), written in alternating prose and poetry, and the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize and Izumi Shikibu Prize for her novel Toge-nuki Jizō: Shin Sugamo Jizō engi (The Thorn-Pulling Jizō: New Tales of the Jizō at Sugamo), which infuses prose with her irrepressibly poetic spirit.

Read poems by Hiromi Itō on Poetry International Web.

Fri 18 June, 19:15 hrs, foyer; 20:00 hrs, small auditorium

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