Hirano Keiichiro in conversation with Kendall Heitzman - Eclipse
Schedule
Tue, 24 Feb, 2026 at 07:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240 | Iowa City, IA
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Hirano Keiichiro will read from his bestselling novel Eclipse, which was recently translated into English, and will be joined in conversation with University of Iowa professor Kendall Heitzman. Winner of the 2025 Japan - U.S. Friendship Commission Prize (awarded annually by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University), Eclipse is "set at the end of the 15th century, in a small village rampaged by the plague, and...[follows] the travels of a young learned priest and written with elegant prose" (en.k-hirano.com). Peter Gordon of the Asian Review of Books praises Eclipse, saying in a recent review: "Eclipse was published in 1998 when Hirano was still an undergraduate. He was hailed as a prodigy. The book sold 400,000 copies and won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. However curious the effort may seem—the fact that it seems curious is itself curious; Western writers regularly set historical novels in Asia—one can see why: Eclipse is an engaging, thought-provoking and deeply-imagined work."Keiichiro Hirano has written more than 15 novels since his debut work Eclipse, for which he won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize at the record age of 23. His deeply psychological fiction deals with profound and universal themes like self-love, relationships and acceptance, and spans from short stories and historical novels to essays, love stories, and literary sci-fi. As a cultural envoy to Paris appointed by Japan’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs, he traveled all over Europe giving lectures and many of his books have been translated and are widely read in United States, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China, Korea, etc. In his widely viewed TED talk, he discusses what it means to really love oneself, arguing that it’s not easy to holistically love ourselves without knowing all our “selves”, good and bad, but we can discover the “self” we like with the help of the person we love.
Kendall Heitzman translates contemporary Japanese fiction and poetry. His translation of Fujino Kaori’s Nails and Eyes (Pushkin Press, 2023) was awarded the Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He has published translations of several IWP participants, including Nakagami Nori and Shibasaki Tomoka in venues such as Cha and the US-Japan Women’s Journal, and his translations of Furukawa Hideo appear in recent issues of the literary journal Monkey. He is a co-editor of the Cornell Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, forthcoming from Cornell University Press, for which he is translating work by several young Japanese poets. He also teaches the Japanese-to-English translation workshop.
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Where is it happening?
15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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