Woman Who Brings the Rain: A Memoir of Hokkaido, Japan

As much about learning a language as it is about nature, this dignified and nuanced memoir of the author’s stay on the remote Hokkaido island in the far north of Japan evokes what is cultured and cultivated, and yet also honours the wild; the untranslatable.

Eluned Gramich is a Welsh-German writer, translator and librarian. Her memoir of her time in Hokkaido, Japan, Women Who Brings the Rain, won the inaugural New Welsh Writing Award in 2015 and was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2016. More recently, she received the Ghastling Novella Award 2020 for a lockdown ghost story, Sleep Training. Her dé but novel, Windstill (Honno), came out in November 2022. She lives in Aberystwyth with her partner and two daughters.