Nora Bierich, born in Berlin where she also lives today, looks back on an international education career in different languages. After a study trip to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1977 where she learned Spanish, Nora enrolled in Romance studies, anthropology, philosophy and Japanese studies at Free University Berlin and graduated with a Master degree in 1989. In the same year, a scholarship program of the Japanese Monbushô and the Japan Foundation lead her to Meiji University Tôkyô, Japan, for the research of the reception of Michel Foucault in Japan. Since 1992 she is working as a freelance translator for Japanese-German (literature, subtitles film, philosophy, art history). Among many others she translated works by Nobel Prize winner in literature Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima and Haruki Murakami. In 2019 she was awarded the Translation Prize of the Japan Foundation and the Noma Honyakusho (together with Ursula Gräfe). In August 2021 Nora became first chairperson of the Weltlesebühne e.V., a network of literary translators, and she belongs to the curatorial team of translationale berlin, a festival for literary translations that first took place in October 2021.