Nick Bradley was born in Germany in 1982 and grew up in Bath. After graduating with a master’s degree in English literature, he went to Japan for ‘just one year’ and returned to England ten years later to attend the Creative Writing MA at University of East Anglia, graduating in 2016.

He has worked in a variety of jobs, including: Japanese teacher, English teacher, video game translator, travel writer, and photographer. He speaks Japanese fluently, and holds a PhD funded by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation in Creative & Critical Writing at UEA, focusing on the figure of the cat in Japanese literature.

His debut novel The Cat & The City was published by Atlantic in 2020 and picked as a BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick, hailed as one of the Independent's best June debuts, and called ‘Ingenious. . . touching, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking,’ (Guardian) and ‘A love letter to Japan and its literature’ (Rowan Hisayo Buchanan). The Times said ‘If you're itching to read a new novel by David Mitchell. . . try this,’ and David Peace, author of The Tokyo Trilogy, said the book ‘masterfully weaves together seemingly disparate threads to conjure up a vivid tapestry of Tokyo; its glory, its shame, its characters, and a calico cat.’

Nick’s second novel, Four Seasons in Japan, was published by Doubleday in 2023. His translation of Natsume Soseki Japanese classic, I Am a Cat, was released in September 2025.

He currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s programme at the University of Cambridge, and has also taught on the MA in Creative Writing at UEA. He was recently chosen by The National Centre for Writing and The British Council as one of ten Rising Stars in UK writing. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

Nick’s favourite Street Fighter II character is Ken.

He lives in Norwich. (Aha).