Conversation with Fantasy Author Kashiwaba Sachiko
Author's Talk

A prolific writer of children’s and young adult fantasy, Kashiwaba Sachiko's career spans more than four decades. Her works have garnered the prestigious Sankei, Shogakukan, and Noma children’s literature awards, and her novel, The Marvelous Village Veiled in Mist, influenced Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away.

Kashiwaba will be in Washington D.C. to accept the 2022 Mildred L Batchelder Award for her work, Temple Alley Summer. A fantastical and mysterious adventure story, Temple Alley Summer will be her first work to be translated into English. The Batchelder Award is given annually to “a children’s book considered to be the most outstanding of those books originating in a country other than the United States and in a language other than English and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States during the preceding year.”

Avery Fischer Udagawa grew up in Kansas and studied English and Asian Studies at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. She holds an M.A. in Advanced Japanese Studies from The University of Sheffield. She has studied at Nanzan University, Nagoya, on a Fulbright Fellowship, and at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, Yokohama. She writes, translates, and works in international education near Bangkok, where she lives with her bicultural family.