Louise Heal Kawai has been a Japanese-English literary translator since 2006. Her translations include a variety of mystery and literary fiction. In 2025 she was awarded the Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture for her translation of The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama. She is also the translator of Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books. Louise comes from Manchester in the UK and currently resides in Yokohama.