Takashi Hiraide

Takashi Hiraide (平出 隆) is a Japanese poet, critic, book designer, and professor.

Takashi Hiraide graduated from Hitotsubashi University in the 1970s and shortly after published his first collection of Poems, "The Inn" (1976) while working as an editor at Kawadeshobishinsha, a publishing house in Tokyo.

In 1985, Hiraide spent three months at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, as poet in residence.

During that time, he began writing postcards, addressed to the artist, Donald Evans.

In 1990, Hiraide began teaching at Tama Art University, as a professor in poetics.

From 1998 to 1999 Hiraide was a visiting scholar at the Berlin Free University, his time there became the basis of a book later published in 2002.

Hiraide's poetry and book design has led him to be a guest at several literary events, some of which were international:

Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe, has praised Hiraide's works as "an experiment that gives birth to a new kind of prose from within poetry".

His works available in English translation include, Postcards to Donald Evans (2003), For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (2008) and The Guest Cat (2014).

Postcards to Donald Evans (2003) was an initial publication of the Tibor de Nagy Foundation.

The book was the subject matter for a 2005 article published in the Literature & Aesthetics, a Sydney Open Journal, and a publication of the University of Sydney.

Postcards to Donald Evans is also featured as a part of a perpetual online exhibit on tumblr, ⌥ + ␣ + esc [sic].

Both, For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (2008) and The Guest Cat (2014), were published by New Directions.

Hiraide's most celebrated work, published in English, is The Guest Cat (2014).

The Guest Cat made the New York Times best-seller list in the same year it was published in English, 2014 and has reached international acclaim.