Nao Kawamoto (born 1980) is a Japanese novelist and literary critic from Tokyo. He began his career in 2011 with an interview with the American writer Gore Vidal published in the literary magazine Shincho and subsequently worked in literary criticism and nonfiction. His first novel, "Jurian Batora no Shinjitsu no Shogai," published in 2021, received the 73rd Yomiuri Prize for Literature in the fiction category and the ninth Shakeko Literary Prize. Presented as a memoir by the mysterious writer Anthony Anderson, the novel reconstructs the life of Julian Butler, an entirely fictional American novelist supposedly associated with such real-life figures as Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and Norman Mailer. By inserting invented writers, books, and relationships into actual twentieth-century literary and political history, Kawamoto creates an alternative history of American literature in which the boundaries between biography and fiction, historical fact and invention, continually shift.
