Susan Karen Burton Author

Susan Karen Burton is an oral historian with an interest in creative nonfiction. She was born in Scotland, raised in New Zealand and spent most of her working life in Japan. There, like many of the interviewees in this book, she began her career as a Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme assistant language teacher (ALT) in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture. She was later a Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) scholar at Tsuda Juku University in Tokyo. After gaining her doctorate in history from the University of Sussex, she lectured in Japanese universities for ten years before returning to the UK to do a second PhD, this time in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia. She won the New Welsh Writing Awards 2020 Rheidol Prize for Prose with a Welsh Theme or Setting for an early chapter from this book, 'The Transplantable Roots of Catharine Huws Nagashima'.