Kerri
Sakamoto

Kerri Sakamoto was born in Toronto to a Japanese Canadian family. Her first novel, The Electrical Field, was a finalist for a slew of awards—the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Canada–Japan Literary Award. The Toronto Star said “Kerri Sakamoto represents a major new force in the landscape of Canadian fiction.” Kerri grew up in mostly white suburban Etobicoke of the 1960s and ’70s; her parents avoided talking about the camps, or even about Japanese culture and history, even though racial taunts were a fact of life. She found out about the internment camps at the age of twenty, reading a magazine article. She read Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and worked with Kogawa in the redress movement for two years, although her parents refused to attend the meetings. “It was the idea of being visible once again that was uncomfortable for them.” She felt compelled to write about the internment and its residual effects.