Motoya Yukiko was born in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, in 1979. After graduating high school she moved to Tokyo to study to drama. In 2000 she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she writes and directs. She debuted as a novelist in 2002 with the short story “Eriko and Zettai,” which appeared in the prestigious literary magazine Gunzo. Read More Her 2005 novel Cowards, Show Your Sad Love was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize, and also turned into a movie that was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. In 2006 Love as a By-Product of Life, the novella with which the featured story first appeared, was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. Motoya won the Noma Prize for New Writers, for Warm Poison, in 2011. Other novels include Vengeance Can Wait, an English adaptation of which was staged at PS122 in New York City in 2008, as part of the Best of the Boroughs Festival, and later made into a film in Japan; That Girl’s Got Some Funny Ideas, also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize; and Despair. Her plays have won major literary and dramatic awards in Japan.