Want fewer ads?

Royall Tyler (born 1936) is a Japanologist. He is a descendant of the American playwright Royall Tyler (1757—1826). He was born in London, England, and grew up in Massachusetts, England, Washington D.C., and Paris, France. Between 1990 and 2000 he taught at the Australian National University. He was Reader at that university and is now a visiting Fellow in ANU's Faculty of Asian Studies. He has translated an anthology of Japanese folklore, a collection of Noh plays, and, recently The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.

He has a B.A. in Far Eastern Languages (1957) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University, and has also taught at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and the University of Oslo, Norway. At Columbia he was supervised by the doyen of Japanese studies in the West, Donald Keene.

He lives in New South Wales, outside Canberra in Australia.

In 2008, the government of Japan conferred the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, which represents the third highest of eight classes associated with this award. This honor acknowledged his exceptional contribution in introducing non Japanese audiences to the Noh theatre through "his highly acclaimed translations and publications of numerous Noh plays, culminating in over forty years of research and deep understanding of classical Japanese literature and culture."

In 2001 Dr Tyler completed translating the entire Tale of Genji, a task that took approximately eight years. It is the third translation of the entire Tale into English.

Honors

• Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, 2008.
• Japan Foundation: Japan Foundation Award, 2007.
• Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Translation Award, 2001.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Royall Tyler", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0