Poets

Shuntarō Tanikawa was born in Tokyo in 1931 as the only son of a prominent philosopher Tetsuzō Tanikawa. He started writing poetry at the age 17 and his first poems were published in a prestigious literary magazine in 1950. His debut collection Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude in 1952 startled his peer poets and literary critics as something they had never seen before and established itself as the new milestone for the post WWII Japanese poetics.
Shuntarō has been awarded with the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1983, the Modern Poetry Hanatsubaki Prize in 1985, Takashi Saida Prize in 1987, Shogakukan Literary Prize in 1988, the Yutaka Maruyama Memorial Modern Poetry Prize in 1991, the First Sakutaro Hagiwara Award in 1993, the Asahi Prize in 1996, Sasakawa Foundation Prize in 1998, ENEOS Children Culture Prize in 2000, Ding Jun Literary Prize in China in 2005, Mainichi Art Prize in 2006, Mongolian Writers Union Prize in 2008, the First Nobuo Ayukawa Prize in 2010, Zhongkun International Poetry Prize in 2011, the Tatsuji Miyoshi Prize in 2016, the Japan Foundation Prize in 2019, among others. He also won the 1962 Japan Record Awards for his lyrics of the song “A Poem about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday”.