Sayaka Murata
村田沙耶香
Sayaka Murata (村田沙耶香 Murata Sayaka; born August 14, 1979) is a Japanese writer. She has won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the Mishima Yukio Prize, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, and the Akutagawa Prize.
Murata was born in Inzai, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, in 1979. As a child, she often read science fiction and mystery novels borrowed from her brother and mother, and her mother bought her a word processor after she attempted to write a novel by hand in the fourth grade of elementary school. After Murata completed middle school in Inzai, her family moved to Tokyo, where she graduated from Kashiwa High School (attached to Nishogakusha University) and attended Tamagawa University.
