Antonian named runner-up for BCLA’s inaugural First Book Prize

Antonian Dr Fusako Innami (DPhil Oriental Studies, 2011) has been named as the runner-up for the British Comparative Literature Association’s 2025 First Book Prize for her book Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (University of Michigan Press). The award honours an outstanding first monograph in the field of comparative literature.

The judges commended the book as ‘an exciting book that examines literary and textual descriptions of vision and touch as acts of translation and mediation across the senses, particularly when vision and description substitute for touch. It is a theoretically sophisticated study that offers an insightful discussion of relationality through the skin and interactions of the body and language in the writings of Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko.’

You can find out more about the BCLA’s First Book Prize by following this link.