Leith Morton

Leith Morton was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1951. He graduated from Sydney University after obtaining a PhD in Japanese literature, and was soon appointed to a lectureship and senior lectureship in Japanese at his alma mater. He subsequently held professorships in Japanese at Newcastle University (Australia) and in comparative literature at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he currently teaches. He began writing poetry (and playing football) as a teenager and his first books were all poetry collections. Since then he has also written books on Japanese literature and culture in both English and Japanese, as well as translating into English a number of volumes (poetry and prose) from Japanese. For a full list of his books, at present numbering over 20 volumes, see his website at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His latest book of poetry is called 'Tokyo: A Poem in Four Chapters' (2006). He is currently translating the tanka poetry of Samio Maekawa (1903-90), a pioneer modernist tanka poet, and has written a book in Japanese on Akiko Yosano (1878-1942), the greatest woman poet of 20th century Japan. Apart from his family, he has two great loves: poetry and football--difficult to combine together--and he is the first foreign soccer player to represent a Japanese city (Sakai) in the amateur intercity league. He supports Everton in the English Premier League, Newcastle in the Australian A League and Tokyo FC in the J League.