Tanikawa Shuntarō, born December 15, 1931 in Tokyo, Japan, is a Japanese poet and translator. He is one of the most widely read and highly regarded of living Japanese poets, both in Japan and abroad, and a frequent subject of speculations regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has won every major Japanese literary award. Read More Several of his collections, including his selected works, have been translated into English, and his Floating the River in Melancholy, translated by William I. Eliot and Kazuo Kawamura, won the American Book Award in 1989. Tanikawa has written more than sixty books of poetry in addition to translating Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" and the Mother Goose rhymes into Japanese. He has been nominated for the 2008 Hans Christian Anderson Award for his contributions to children's literature. He also helped translate "Swimmy" by Leo Lionni into Japanese. Among his contribution to less conventional art genres is his open video-correspondence with Shuji Terayama (Video Letter, 1983).