Oe kenzaburo biography of william

Japanese writer and Nobel Laureate (–)

Kenzaburō Ōe (大江 健三郎, Ōe Kenzaburō, 31 January – 3 March ) was a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature.

His novels, short stories and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism.

Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today".^[1]

Early life and education

Ōe was born in Ōse (大瀬村, Ōse-mura), a village now in Uchiko, Ehime Prefecture, on Shikoku.^[2] The third of seven children, he grew up listening to his grandmother, a storyteller of myths and folklore, who also recounted the oral history of the two uprisings in the region before and after the Meiji Restoration.^[3&#