Joy Kogawa
| Joy Kogawa | |
|---|---|
| Born | Joy Nozomi Nakayama June 6, 1935 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Notable works | Obasan |
| Notable awards | Order of Canada, Order of British Columbia, Order of the Rising Sun |
| Website | |
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Joy Nozomi Kogawa, CM, OBC (born June 6, 1935) is a Canadian poet and novelist of Japanese descent.
Kogawa was born Joy Nozomi Nakayama on June 6, 1935, in Vancouver, British Columbia, to first-generation Japanese Canadians Lois Yao Nakayama and Gordon Goichi Nakayama. She grew up in a predominantly white, middle-class community.
During World War II, the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and twelve weeks later Kogawa was sent with her family to the internment camp for Japanese Canadians at Slocan during World War II. After the war she resettled with her family in Coaldale, Alberta, where she completed high school. In 1954 she attended the University of Alberta, in 1956 the Anglican Women's Training College and The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. She moved back to Vancouver in 1956 and married David Kogawa there in 1957, with whom she had two children: Gordon and Deirdre. The couple divorced in 1968, and the same year Kogawa attended the University of Saskatchewan. She moved to Toronto in 1979 and has lived there since.
Kogawa's published first as a poet, beginning in 1968 with The Splintered Moon. She began to work as a staff writer for the Office of the Prime Minister in Ottawa in 1973. In 1981 she published her first prose work: Obasan, a semi-autobiographical novel that has become her best-known work.Books in Canada awarded the book its First Novel Award for it in 1981, and in 1982 Kogawa won the Book of the Year Award from the Canadian Authors Association and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Kogawa adapted the book for children as Naomi's Road in 1985.
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