Royall Tyler (born 1936 in London, England) is a scholar, writer, and translator of Japanese literature. Major works include English translations of The Tale of the Heike (平家物語, Heike Monogatari) which won the 2012 Lois Roth Award, and The Tale of Genji (源氏物語, Genji Monogatari) which received the Japan-US Friendship Commission Translation Prize in 2001.
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Career
Tyler completed his B.A. in Far Eastern Languages at Harvard University in 1957. He then obtained a master's degree in Japanese history and PhD in Japanese literature at Columbia University, where he was supervised by Donald Keene. After teaching at Ohio State, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University Oslo (Norway) became head of the Japan Centre in the faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. With his wife, Susan Tyler, he retired in 2000 to rural New South Wales. Between 1993 and 2023 the couple bred alpacas on their property near the town of Braidwood.
Honors
Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Translation Prize, 2002
Japan Foundation: Japan Foundation Award, 2007
Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, 2008
Lois Roth Award, 2012.
Selected works and translations
Japanese Tales, Pantheon, 1987
French Folktales, Pantheon, 1989
Japanese Nô Dramas, Penguin, 1990
The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity, Columbia University Press, 1992
The Tale of Genji, Viking, 2001 (hardback) and Penguin, 2002 (softcover)
Mistress Oriku: Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Kawaguchi Matsutarô, Tuttle, 2007
The Glass Slipper and Other Stories by Yasuoka Shôtarô, Dalkey Archive Press, 2008
The Ise Stories: Ise monogatari, University of Hawai'i Press, 2010 (with Joshua Mostow)
Flowers of Grass by Fukunaga Takehiko, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012
The Tale of the Heike, Penguin, 2012
A Great Valley Under the Stars, Isobar Press, 2014
The Castelvecchio Family, by William R. Tyler (formatted and supplemented), 2014
From the Bamboo-View Pavilion: Takemuki-ga-ki, Blue-Tongue Books, 2016
A Reading of The Tale of Genji, Blue-Tongue Books, 2016
Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams: Twenty Plays from the Noh Tradition, Columbia University Press, 2024