Marie “KonMari” Kondo runs an acclaimed consulting business in Tokyo helping clients transform their cluttered homes into spaces of serenity and inspiration. With a three-month waiting list, her KonMari Method of decluttering and organising has become an international phenomenon. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is a bestseller in Japan, Germany, and the UK, with more than two million copies sold worldwide, and has been turned into a television drama for Japanese TV. She has been featured on more than thirty major Japanese television and radio programs as well as in The London Times, The Sunday Times, Red Magazine, The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times, and many more. Lucy Scott is a British actress who has been working in film and television since the early 1990s. She is best known for playing Charlotte Lucas in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. Her stage credits include Emma at the Tricycle Theatre, Search and Destroy as Mary at the New End Theatre and as Nikki in Things We Do for Love. She also appeared in an episode of comedy show Modern Toss. As well as acting, Scott worked as a script supervisor on the first episode of Popetown, called 'The Double'. Cathy Hirano is a translator of Japanese fiction for young adults. She is the translator for the English editions of the Moribito novels, Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit and Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness. Hirano currently resides in Shikoku, Japan. Originally born and raised in Canada, Hirano moved to Kyoto, Japan in 1978 as an English teacher. After graduating from the International Christian University of Cultural Anthropology in 1983, she became a freelance translator in 1987[2]. In 1997, Hirano's translation of The Friends by Kazumi Yumoto won the Batchelder Award for literature in translation and the Boston Globe-Horn Book award for fiction[1][3]. In 2009, Her translation of Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit was also awarded the Batchelder Award[2].
'Its strength is its simplicity.' -- The Times