Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal, born in Nottingham in 1964, is a British ceramic artist and writer. He trained as a potter before studying English literature at Cambridge, then returned to Japan to study its language and ceramics. In his visual art, he is known for installations that arrange handmade porcelain vessels in vitrines and architectural spaces.

His nonfiction grows from the same close attention to materials. Objects become routes into family history, migration, collecting and loss. The Hare with Amber Eyes follows 264 Japanese netsuke through generations of the Ephrussi family, from nineteenth-century Paris to Vienna under Nazi rule and postwar Tokyo. His measured, reflective prose combines memoir with cultural and archival history.

The Hare with Amber Eyes won the 2010 Costa Biography Award and the 2011 RSL Ondaatje Prize. De Waal later traced porcelain’s global history in The White Road and returned to Jewish collecting, memory and destruction in Letters to Camondo. In 2015, Yale’s Windham-Campbell Prizes honored his nonfiction.

Begin with The Hare with Amber Eyes. It is the clearest meeting point between de Waal’s work as a maker and as a writer: a family story told through small objects that were handled, hidden, transported and inherited. The netsuke give the narrative an intimate scale even as it crosses continents and confronts the upheavals of European history.