Fuminori Nakamura was born in Aichi in 1977. In 2002, he won the prestigious Shincho Newcomer’s Award for his first novel A Gun, and in 2005 he won the Akutagawa Prize for The Boy in the Earth. The Thief, winner of the 2009 Ōe Prize, Japan’s most important literary award, is his first novel to be published in English.