Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker, novelist, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose award-winning novels have been described as “witty, intelligent and passionate” by The Independent, and as possessing “shrewd and playful humor, luscious sexiness and kinetic pizzazz” by the Chicago Tribune.

Ozeki’s 2013 novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and explores the relationships between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth. Her latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021), the 2022 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a brilliantly inventive new story about a boy who hears the voices of objects all around him and a mother drowning in her possessions.  

Ruth Ozeki was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, by an American father and a Japanese mother. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College and traveled extensively in Asia. She received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara University. During her years in Japan, she worked in Kyoto’s entertainment or “water” district as a bar hostess, studied flower arrangement as well as Noh drama and mask carving, founded a language school, and taught in the English Department at Kyoto Sangyo University.

This event is free and open to the public. Members of the general public must register in advance before arriving on campus. No prior registration is required for Wellesley College faculty, staff, or students. 

This event will be livestreamed at wellesley.edu/live. No prior registration required. 

For more information on Ruth Ozeki, please visit prhspeakers.com.