Julie Otsuka was born on May 15, 1962, in Palo Alto, California. She studied art as an undergraduate at Yale University and pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing in her thirties. After receiving her MFA from Columbia University, Otsuka began to write about her family's history, focusing on the Japanese internment camps during World War II.
Otsuka's debut novel, "When the Emperor Was Divine," was published in 2002 and became a critically acclaimed bestseller. The novel is based on Otsuka's own family history, as her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and her mother, uncle, and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. The novel has been translated into six languages and has sold more than 250,000 copies. It has been assigned to all incoming freshmen at over 35 colleges and universities and is a regular 'Community Reads' selection across the US.
In addition to "When the Emperor Was Divine," Otsuka has written a second novel, "The Buddha in the Attic," which was published in 2011 and nominated for the National Book Award. The novel tells the story of a group of young Japanese "picture brides" who sailed to America in the early 1900s to become the wives of men they had never met. Otsuka's fiction has been published in Granta and Harper's and has been read aloud on PRI's "Selected Shorts" and BBC Radio 4's "Book at Bedtime." She currently lives in New York City, where she writes every afternoon in her neighborhood café.