Keiichirō Hirano (平野 啓一郎, Hirano Keiichirō, born June 22, 1975) is a Japanese novelist. Hirano was born in Gamagori, Aichi prefecture, Japan. He published his first novel (Nisshoku, 日蝕) in 1998 and won the Akutagawa Prize the next year as one of the youngest winners ever (at 23 years of age). He graduated from the Law Department of Kyoto University in 1999. In 2005 he was nominated as a cultural ambassador and spent a year in France. Source: Wikipedia (en)