Kenzaburō Ōe

Kenzaburō Ōe was a Japanese novelist and essayist, born on 31 January 1935 in Ōse, a village in the forested mountains of Shikoku. He grew up during the Second World War and its aftermath, and the experience of Japan's defeat and the postwar democratic ideals shaped his work for the rest of his life. He began publishing while still a student at the University of Tokyo and quickly became one of the leading voices of his generation.

His fiction often draws on the birth of his eldest son, Hikari, who has a disability, and on questions of family, memory, violence and survival in the nuclear age. He also wrote essays on Hiroshima and spoke publicly for pacifism and against nuclear weapons. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. Ōe died on 3 March 2023, leaving a body of work admired for its moral seriousness and its inventive, demanding style.