Clara Kumagai is from Canada, Japan and Ireland. Her fiction and non-fiction for children and adults has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee and The Kyoto Journal. Her debut YA novel, Catfish Rolling blends magical realism with Japanese myth in a story about grief, memory and time. Catfish Rolling was nominated for the YOTO Carnegie Award, a finalist for the Great Reads Award and shortlisted for the 2023 KPMG Children's Books Ireland Awards. She lives and writes in Ireland.
Here is the blurb from Clara’s book:
There's a catfish under the islands of Japan and when it rolls the land rises and falls.
Sora hates the catfish whose rolling caused an earthquake so powerful it cracked time itself. It destroyed her home and took her mother. Now Sora and her scientist father live close to the zones – the wild and abandoned places where time runs faster or slower than normal. Sora is sensitive to the shifts, and her father recruits her help in exploring these liminal spaces.
But it's dangerous there – and as she strays further inside in search of her mother, she finds that time distorts, memories fracture and shadows, a glimmer of things not entirely human, linger. After Sora's father goes missing, she has no choice but to venture into uncharted spaces within the time zones to find him, her mother and perhaps even the catfish itself...
https://www.instagram.com/clarakiyoko
https://x.com/clarakiyoko
Do you have a question for the Ask Us Anything segment?
Any topic is fine, we love to hear from all our listeners. Email us here and we will do our best to answer your question in one of the episodes.
thecreativitycafe21@gmail.com
https://www.instagram.com/thecreativitycafepodcast
Paige Baldwin Ando
https://www.wholeselfcreative.com
https://instagram.com/wholeselfcreative
Jordana Matsuda
https://instagram.com/jordanaillustration
https://www.jordana-matsuda.com
