Amy Stanley’s “Stranger in the Shogun’s City” wins Taiwan’s 2022 OpenBook Award

Amy Stanley, Professor of History at Northwestern, has won Taiwan’s 2022 OpenBook Award for her book, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World.

“It’s the story of a rebellious, discontented woman who sacrificed everything to be there,” Stanley says on her website. “The book follows her from her childhood in Japan’s snow country through three catastrophic marriages and a devastating famine to her escape to the shogun’s capital. It’s about how a woman used the city to recreate herself — as a maidservant, a tenement-dweller, a samurai’s wife — and how she, and others like her, built the global megalopolis we know today.”

Stranger in the Shogun’s City has received several awards since its 2020 publication, including the UK’s Baillie-Gifford Prize and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. It was named a best book of the year by the Economist, New Statesman, Times of London, and Washington Post.

“A compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy,” wrote The Wall Street Journal.

Listen to Stanley discuss her book on the Asian Review of Books podcast.