Polly Barton

Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her debut book Fifty Sounds, a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, was published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April 2021 and by Liveright in the US in early 2022. In 2022, Fifty Sounds was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Her translations have featured in Granta, Catapult, The White Review and Words Without Borders; and her full length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press, 2017), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Ray Bradbury Prize, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Her new book, Porn: An Oral History, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in March 2023 and is forthcoming from La Nave di Teseo in Italy.

Photo courtesy of Garry Loughlin