Holly Thompson did her undergraduate degree in biology and earned her MA in Fiction at the NYU Creative Writing Program. Originally from New England, she has lived and worked in Japan for over 25 years. She is author of three verse novels: the middle grade Falling into the Dragon’s Mouth (Henry Holt), and the young adult verse novels Orchards, winner of the APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and The Language Inside, (both Delacorte/Random House). She is also author of the adult novel Ash (Stone Bridge Press), the forthcoming picture book biography Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodworker (Neal Porter: Holiday House), and picture books Twilight Chant (Clarion/HMH), One Wave at a Time (Albert Whitman & Co.) and The Wakame Gatherers (Lee&Low;/Shen’s). Holly also translates picture books, and she edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories (Stone Bridge Press), a collection of thirty-six Japan-related YA stories, including ten in translation. Holly serves as co-Regional Advisor for the Japan chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (japan.scbwi.org), and teaches writing at Yokohama City University, GrubStreet Boston, and U.C. Berkeley Extension.

Avery Fischer Udagawa’s translations of children’s literature from Japanese include the 2022 Mildred L. Batchelder Award-winning novel Temple Alley Summer by Sachiko Kashiwaba, illustrated by Miho Satake, and the historical novel J-Boys: Kazuo’s World, Tokyo, 1965 by Shogo Oketani. Her short story translations have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Words Without Borders, Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories, The Best Asian Short Stories 2018, and A Tapestry of Colours 1: Stories from Asia. She serves as SCBWI and SCBWI Japan Translator Coordinator.

Was 34 years in Japan, now not. Help with the SWET website as content facilitator.

I translate mostly literature and anything related to sashiko.
Fiction: Ryu: Live, Love Die in the Shadow of the Dragon by Akira Higashiyama (26letters 2025); What You are Looking For Is in the Library (Doubleday 2023) by Aoyama Michiko; The Boy and The Dog by Seishu Hase (Viking Press 2022); Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight and The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda (Bitter Lemon Press, 2022 and 2020); Spark by Naoki Matayoshi (Pushkin 2019) and Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (Oneworld, 2017).
Non-fiction: TAO: On the Road and On the Run in Outlaw China by Aya Goda (Portobello, 2007); Sashiko for Making and mending by Saki Iiduka (Tuttle 2021); Amazing Sashiko by AYUFISH Int (Tuttle 2023); and The New Sashiko by sashikonami (Tuttle 2024).
Read more of my translations and writing online at Words Without Borders and Asymptote.
I was awarded the Kyoko Selden Memorial Prize for Translation in 2021 for an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa’s travel memoir A Dosimeter on The Narrow Road to Oku, and the 2023 Great Britain Sasagawa Foundation Prize for The Boy and The Dog by Seishu Hase.

Specialist in Japanese culture and aesthetics with experience in history, art, architecture, Zen and chanoyu.

I have been living and working in Japan since 1995, and have been working at a major Japanese IT company for over 20 years. I use TRADOS on a daily basis, and also have experience with Deja Vu, Memsource, OmegaT, and various other CAT tools.
I have done consulting regarding translation quality and AI translation (quality
control and preparing pre-/post-editing procedures).

I’ve been a full-time freelance Japanese to English translator and reviewer since 2013. I have excellent research and English writing skills and can assess the appropriate context and tone for your text. I’m used to using many different CAT tools, I know how to format a document in Microsoft Word, and I can usually tell when there’s a typo or OCR error in the source. (Machine translation can’t do that!)  I am committed to quality, consistency, teamwork, and client satisfaction.

Translation (from Japanese into English)
Academic Rewriting and Editing (English)

MA of The University of Geneva, School of Translation (Switzerland)
MA of The University of Sheffield, School of East Asian Studies (UK)