Aki Shimazaki is a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 novelist and translator

Translation

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...

. She moved to Canada in 1981, living in Vancouver

Vancouver

Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...

 and Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

. She has lived in Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

, where she teaches Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 and publishes her novels in French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, since 1991.

Her second novel, Hamaguri, won the Prix Ringuet in 2000. Her fourth, Wasurenagusa, won the Canada-Japan Literary Prize in 2002. Her fifth, Hotaru, won the 2005 Governor General's Award

2005 Governor General's Awards

The nominees for the 2005 Governor General's Awards for Literary Merit were announced on October 17. Winning titles were announced on November 16...

for French fiction. Her books have been translated in English, Japanese, German, Hungarian and Russian.

Novels

• Tsubaki, 1999
• Hamaguri, 2000
• Tsubame, 2001
• Wasurenagusa, 2002
• Hotaru, 2005
• Mitsuba, 2006
• Zakuro, 2008