Aki Shimazaki is a French-language novelist and translator best known for Tsubaki (1999), a novel set in Nagasaki in which the dropping of the atomic bomb figures prominently. Tsubaki, her first book, has been translated into English, and her books have also been translated into Japanese, German, Hungarian, and Russian.
Shimazaki was born in Gifu, Japan, and immigrated to Canada in 1981. She lived in Vancouver and Toronto for ten years before moving to Montreal, where she teaches Japanese and writes.
She has published fourteen novels, all of which have Japanese titles, in three interconnected cycles. Shimazaki has won several awards for French Canadian fiction, including the Canada-Japan literary Prize and the Governor General’s Award (June 2017).
