The Akutagawa Prize: Every Winner Since 1935, and Which Ones Are in English
Japan’s most watched literary prize is given twice a year, in January and in July, to a story or a short novel by a writer who is not yet established. It has been running since 1935, it is followed on the evening news, and winning it can turn an unknown into a household name in a week. For anyone reading in English there is one hard fact behind all of that: of the 189 winning works, only 59 have ever been translated. This page lists every one of them and says, for each, whether you can read it or not.
By Lisanne Swart · 189 winners since 1935 · 59 of them in English · Authors by country · Last reviewed 17 September 2026
The last fifteen awards · 2021 to 2026
Click a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
The Akutagawa Prize goes twice a year to a piece of serious fiction by a new or rising Japanese writer, and has done since 1935. It is worth one million yen and a pocket watch, and it is decided by a committee of established novelists. There have been 175 sittings; 33 of them ended with the judges giving no prize at all, and 47 ended with two winners. Of the 189 winning works, 59 exist in English. Which 130 do not is the part no other list will tell you, and it is marked on every row of the table below.
How this page chooses
Two jobs, kept apart. The table lists every sitting from 1935 to 2026 with the Japanese title and, where one exists, the English edition — facts only, including the 33 sittings where the honest entry is that nobody won and the 130 works where it is that there is nothing to buy in English.
The fifteen with a full entry are simply the fifteen most recent awards. There is no ranking in it and no shortlist of favourites. Under each one is a line of plain fact — the translator, the English publisher, another prize — and nothing that cannot be checked. Where a book has no English edition, the heading is its Japanese title, because pretending otherwise would send you looking for something that does not exist.
Quick facts about the Akutagawa Prize
Founded
In 1935 by Kikuchi Kan, in memory of the writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke
Run by
The Nihon Bungaku Shinkokai, for the publisher Bungeishunju
Prize money
¥1,000,000, plus a commemorative pocket watch
Announced
Twice a year, in January and in July
For
Junbungaku — serious fiction — by a new or rising writer, already published in a literary magazine
Not to be confused with
The Naoki Prize, announced the same evening, which is for popular fiction
Sittings
175 since 1935; the prize was suspended from 1945 to 1948
No winner
33 times — the judges are willing to award nothing at all
Two winners
47 times
In English
59 of 189 winning works
The last fifteen Akutagawa Prize winners, 2021 to 2026
Oldest first. Where a book exists in English the English title is the heading and the Japanese one is underneath; where it does not, the Japanese title is the heading. The line in red is a fact about the book, not an opinion about it.
01
FictionEnglish 2025
The Place of Shells
Japanese title: Kai ni Tsuzuku Basho nite
Ishizawa Mai · 2021, first half
The unnamed narrator is a woman from Sendai living in Göttingen, Germany, in the summer of 2020, writing a doctoral thesis on Renaissance art history as Europe reopens after the first COVID lockdowns. She is visited by Nomiya, an old friend from Sendai who was presumed dead in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Other figures from the past appear alongside him, including the scientist Terada Torahiko, who lived more than a century earlier. The book draws on Göttingen’s Planet Path, the iconography of Catholic saints and shells as pilgrimage symbols.
Translated into English by Polly Barton and published by New Directions.
A teenage girl washes up on the beach of an island with no memory of who she is. The girl who finds her names her Umi, and Umi learns that the island is a matriarchy governed by shamanic figures called noro, who present imported goods as gifts from an afterworld. Training to become a noro herself, she uncovers the island’s founding: after a pandemic set off xenophobia in Japan and China, refugees from both countries wiped out the indigenous population and built a new society led by women. Three languages are spoken on the island, one of them reserved for the noro.
The author was born in Taiwan, began learning Japanese as a teenager and writes in Japanese.
Sakuma is a bicycle messenger in his late twenties working in Tokyo during the pandemic years. On a rainy autumn day a Mercedes cuts him off at an intersection; he crashes, wrecks his bicycle and misses his delivery deadline, and spends the rest of the day trying to get the bike repaired and pick up gig work. The second half of the book finds him in prison, moving between flashbacks and the present, where repeated outbursts land him in solitary confinement.
Japanese title: Oishii Gohan ga Taberaremasu yo ni
Takase Junko · 2022, first half
The book is set in a branch office of a small company in suburban Tokyo. Nitani, a male employee, avoids eating and is puzzled by his colleagues’ preoccupation with food. He is caught between two women at the office: Ashikawa, who cooks and bakes for her co-workers, and Oshio, a hard-working colleague and drinking companion whose feelings for him are not returned.
For the first time in the prize’s history, every finalist at this sitting was a woman.
The whole story takes place inside a shopping mall near the protagonist’s home. Hoga-san, a middle-aged woman who works at the mall, is divorced with two grown daughters, one at university and one teaching. She notices a fifteen-year-old girl studying in the food court while minding her infant brother, and the girl reminds her of her own daughters. Hoga offers her unsolicited motherly advice, and the exchange turns awkward. The novella is written in the second person throughout, addressing the protagonist as anata.
The author is a poet who also works as a high school language and literature teacher.
Yuji is a gardener in his forties living on the coast of Miyagi with his mother and his son, who is in his sixth year of primary school. The story is set ten years after the 2011 tsunami, and moves in flashback through the years before, during and after the disaster. A cleared strip of land by the seawall marks where his old neighbourhood stood. His first wife died, a pregnancy was lost, and his second wife left; his work transplanting trees runs alongside the reconstruction going on around him.
The author was born in Sendai in 1982 and works in a bookshop.
Izawa Shaka lives in a group care home and has myotubular myopathy, the same congenital muscular disorder as the author. She writes pornography and posts it online, and narrates her thoughts on an art vandalism incident, on religion and on how disabled bodies are shown in films. The book turns on an exchange between Shaka and a male care worker at the home.
Polly Barton’s English translation was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
In a near-future Tokyo where sympathy towards criminals has become the norm, the architect Sara Machina is designing Sympathy Tower Tokyo, a skyscraper that will house convicted offenders in comfort. She has doubts about the building and about the values behind it, and is haunted by a crime from her own childhood. Her relationship with her much younger boyfriend Takt frays as she turns to an AI chatbot for ideas. The novel is told by several narrators who see the tower differently.
The author said that roughly five per cent of the text came directly from ChatGPT.
An and Shun are conjoined twins who share a single body but have separate consciousnesses, each controlling one half and sharing some organs while having duplicates of others. The book covers the death of their uncle and the forty-ninth-day memorial rite that follows. Their father and their uncle share a rarer condition still: the father was born inside his brother’s body, and both lived into middle age. The title compares the twins to the two halves of the yin-yang symbol, sometimes read as a pair of salamanders.
Hata is a mid-career salesman at a Kobe firm that renovates commercial buildings, hired after being restructured out of an earlier job. He joins the company hiking club, which walks the marked trails of the Rokko mountains above the city, and becomes interested in a colleague named Mega, who goes off-trail alone on what is called bari mountaineering. When Hata finally follows Mega onto an unmarked route he slips and nearly dies; afterwards the two fall out and Mega leaves the company, and Hata takes up solo bari hiking looking for traces of him.
Hiroba Toichi is a middle-aged Tokyo professor of German literature who specialises in Goethe. A quotation printed on a tea bag and attributed to Goethe defeats him: he cannot place it in any edition or translation he owns, so he works through his own translations, consults colleagues and dreams of meeting Goethe. His daughter Norika, an undergraduate studying English, traces the line through internet databases to a German gardener and then to a family letter centuries old. His wife Akiko comes from the same scholarly family; her father was Toichi’s doctoral supervisor.
The author was born in 2001 and this was his first book.
A reality dating show is filmed in Bora Bora with an almost entirely white cast and crew. For the first third the book follows the episodes as they stream, then turns to the background of one contestant, billed as Mr Tokyo, whose real name is Iya Kisui, and to his childhood friend Momo, who later turns up on set. Kisui, of Japanese and Korean parentage, performs unlicensed surgery before becoming a torturer; Momo, of Japanese and French Polynesian parentage, is nonbinary and narrates parts of the book in the third person. The two are bound by a surgical incident in middle school, and the story returns to Bora Bora at the end.
The author was born in 1994 and made his debut in 2022.
Hayano works for the city government in Ibaraki, a suburb of Osaka, and is getting over a breakup when he meets a man he calls Sensei, a holy man living in a cave who teaches him to cast and play dotaku, the bronze bells found at ancient sites. Hayano becomes absorbed in local history, in particular an Ibaraki farmer named Otozo who led expeditions to teach opium growing in Manchuria, and in a young amateur astronomer known as young Kawamata. He also begins a relationship with Shiori, another newcomer to the area. The book ends at the 2025 Osaka Expo, where Hayano runs into the crowd and is arrested for disrupting an imperial visit.
The story first appeared in the December 2025 issue of the magazine Shincho.
An unnamed man of thirty-five returns to an empty house in Hyogo prefecture that he knew as a child, to sketch its rooms and details before it is demolished. The house was built after the 1995 earthquake, and the sketching calls up four of the people who lived in it: the man himself, the architect Yabu who designed it after his wife died, a woman named Midori who ran a cram school there after leaving her husband and who lost a childhood friend in the earthquake, and a childless couple, Kei and Shu. The narrative moves between their times and viewpoints, with the house as the thread.
The author works as an architect and lives in Hyogo prefecture, where he was born in 1992.
A woman in her thirties loses her job and her marriage when she and her husband are both laid off and replaced by AI. While he goes away on a performance tour she enters a virtual reality zombie game and stays in it for nine years of game time, about ten real days. Inside the game, set at the Grand Koshinki Hotel, she works as a zombie collector, gathering body parts and blood after the hunters have finished, and grows attached to a timid zombie nicknamed Alaska whom she accompanies to therapy sessions with Mishka, the game’s creator disguised as an NPC therapist. Alaska is killed once he overcomes his fear and joins the fighting; her mother intervenes and she is institutionalised in the real world, then returns to the game.
This was the author’s third time as an Akutagawa Prize finalist.
All 175 sittings, including the 33 where no prize was given. H1 is the first half of the year, announced the following January; H2 is the second half, announced in July. The rows in red are the fifteen most recent, which have a full entry above.
Fifty-odd prizes have gone unawarded in the history of this one. 33 sittings out of 175 ended with the committee deciding that nothing in front of them was good enough, and the most recent of those was as late as the first half of 2025. There is no runner-up in those years and no consolation; the sitting simply has a gap in it.
The reverse happens more often still: 47 sittings produced two winners. In January 2004 the two were Wataya Risa, who was nineteen, and Kanehara Hitomi, who was twenty — the youngest pair in the prize’s history, and between them the reason a literary award led the television news that night.
Why so little of it reaches English
The Akutagawa is given for a story or a short novel published in a Japanese literary magazine, often by a writer with one book to their name. That is exactly the kind of work that does not travel: too short to publish alone in English, by a writer no English-language publisher has heard of yet.
So the ones that do come through tend to arrive years later and only after the writer has become known for something else. Murata Sayaka won in 2016 for Konbini ningen; Ginny Tapley Takemori’s Convenience Store Woman followed in 2018 and sold everywhere. Kawakami Mieko won the prize in 2007 for Chichi to Ran, which has still never been translated — the English Breasts and Eggs is a different, much longer book she wrote in 2019 out of the same material.
Frequently asked questions about the Akutagawa Prize
What is the Akutagawa Prize?
Japan’s best known literary prize, given twice a year since 1935 to a story or a short novel by a new or rising writer, published in a Japanese literary magazine. It is named after the writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke and is worth one million yen and a pocket watch.
Who won the Akutagawa Prize in 2026?
Kosagawa Chito, for Zombie kaishufu, announced on 15 July 2026 for the first half of the year. The sitting before it, announced in January 2026, produced two winners: Hatakeyama Ushio for Sakebi and Toriyama Makoto for Toki no ie.
How many Akutagawa Prize winners can I read in English?
59 of the 189. That leaves 130 that have never been published in English, and the table on this page marks each one rather than quietly leaving it out.
Why does the Akutagawa Prize sometimes have no winner?
Because the committee is allowed to decide that nothing submitted is good enough, and it does. That has happened at 33 of the 175 sittings, most recently in the first half of 2025.
What is the difference between the Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize?
They were founded together in 1935 and are announced on the same evening. The Akutagawa is for serious literary fiction by a writer who is not yet established; the Naoki is for popular fiction by a rising writer, and usually for a full-length book rather than a story.
Who is the youngest writer to win the Akutagawa Prize?
Wataya Risa, who was nineteen when she won in January 2004 for Keritai senaka. She shared that sitting with Kanehara Hitomi, who was twenty. Both books have since been translated into English.
Did an Akutagawa Prize winner use AI to write their book?
In part. Qudan Rie, who won in January 2024 for Tokyo-to dojoto, said afterwards that about five per cent of the text came from ChatGPT, and later clarified that this was the dialogue of a character who is herself talking to an AI. It is published in English as Sympathy Tower Tokyo, translated by Jesse Kirkwood.
Which Akutagawa Prize winner should I read first?
Convenience Store Woman by Murata Sayaka, which won in 2016 and is the one most widely read in English. After that, Hunchback by Ichikawa Saou, translated by Polly Barton, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025.
Who decides the Akutagawa Prize?
A committee of established novelists, appointed by the Nihon Bungaku Shinkokai. Recent members have included Ogawa Yoko, Kawakami Hiromi, Kawakami Mieko and Hirano Keiichiro.
Where can I find more Japanese writers?
My guide to authors by country goes wider than the prize, for Japan and for everywhere else.
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