Mikirō Sasaki, Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetMikirō Sasaki
Japanese poet, lecturer and travel writer
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Ōsaka Prefecture, Japan
About Mikirō Sasaki
- Mikiro Sasaki (??? ??, Sasaki Mikiro, October 20, 1947) is a Japanese poet and travel author, winner of the 2003 Yomiuri Prize for travel essays.
- Sasaki won the award for his book Ajia kaido kiko: umi wa toshi de aru (A Travel Journal of the Asian Seaboard, 2002).
- He has published more than a score of poetry collections and travel books.
- His Demented flute: selected poems, 1967-1986 was published in English in 1988.
- In 2012, his poetry collection Ashita(Tomorrow) won the 2012 Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of Japanese poetry.
- Now, Sasaki lives in Tokyo. Sasaki was born in Nara Prefecture, grew up in Fujiidera City in Osaka, Japan, attending Fujiidera Elementary School, Osaka Municipal Hannan Junior High School, and Ootemae Municipal Senior High School.
- He was enrolled at Doshisha University in Kyoto, majoring in philosophy.
- While there he wrote for the college poetry magazine Moby Dick, and his first collection of poems, Shisya no Muchi: (Whiplash of the Dead, ????, was published in 1970 while he was still in college. In 1976, Sasaki wrote a script for independent film production, Cinema Nesance, about the friendship of the poet Chuya Nakahara and the critic Hideo Kobayashi.
- It was called Honey Sleep and was directed by Hisaya Iwasa.
- Since then he has written a number of screenplays, including a 1990 script for NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) television which won a special award at the Golden Prague International Television Festival (Mezinárodni Televizni Festival Zlatá Praha). In the 1970s, his experiments with a casual, colloquial style coupled with intellectual rigor helped to shape one major direction that Japanese poetry would take in subsequent generations.
- Indeed, his writing provided nourishment to a number of other writers. He has travelled widely.
- In 1984 he was a visiting poet at Oakland University in Michigan.
- In 1988, he travelled to Nepal, Tibet and Shanghai.
- His travelogues and poetic style introduced many in Japan to both the wonders of the Himalayas, and the modern, and very different, culture of the largest city in China.
- He has been active in the field of collaborative poetry, writing renshi under the guidance of Makoto Ooka.Professionally, he was the senior editor of the collected works of Chuya Nakahara, which were published 2000-2004, and he lectured at various liberal arts and music colleges and universities through 2007.
- Sasaki sat for several years on the selection committee for the Chuya Nakahara Prize.
- He frequently represents Japanese poetry overseas at international poetry festivals and other events.
- He is also an accomplished photographer.
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