Ruth Ozeki books

Anthologies

Non-Fiction

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Ruth Ozeki published her debut novel, My Year of Meats, in 1998, and it announced an unusually confident literary voice combining documentary satire with emotional directness. The novel follows a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker uncovering the hormone-laden reality of the American beef industry while her narrative parallels that of a Japanese housewife watching her life change through the American TV show the filmmaker is producing. The environmental critique is sharp, but Ozeki grounds it in characters rather than polemic.

Her second novel, All Over Creation (2003), stays in that territory of agricultural politics and personal reinvention, following a woman who returns to her Idaho potato farming family after years away. A Tale for the Time Being (2013) marked a shift in scope and form: the dual narrative structure links a teenager in Tokyo writing a diary to Ozeki’s narrator, also named Ruth, reading that diary on a remote island in British Columbia years later. The book’s engagement with Zen philosophy and time runs deep without becoming abstract, and the 2013 Booker shortlisting brought Ozeki to a much wider readership.

The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021) won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and continued her exploration of grief, consciousness, and the strange intimacy between readers and books. Her nonfiction work The Face: A Time Code (2015) is a meditation on her own face and the experience of aging, published as a short book accompanying a film she made. Ozeki was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in 2010, and that practice shows in her prose: patient, attentive to things that are easy to overlook.