Katie Kitamura

Kitamura wrote Japanese for Travellers – A Journey, describing her travels across Japan and examining the dichotomies of its society and her own place in it as a Japanese-American.

In 2010, Kitamura's The Longshot was shortlisted for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award.

Kitamura was introduced to mixed martial arts in Japan by her brother. Her first novel, The Longshot, published in 2009, is about the preparation undertaken by a fighter and his trainer ahead of a championship bout against a famous opponent. The cover art of the US edition of her book features the title tattooed on knuckles; the knuckles are her brother's. Kitamura's second novel, Gone to the Forest, published in 2013, is set in an unnamed colonial country and describes the life and suffering of a landowning family against a backdrop of civil strife and political change.

Kitamura graduated from Princeton University in New Jersey in 1999. She earned a PhD in American literature from the London Consortium. Her thesis was titled The Aesthetics of Vulgarity and the Modern American Novel (2005).

Katie Kitamura was born in California in 1979 to a family of Japanese origin, and raised in California.