Toshio Hosokawa (23/10/1955), a Japanese composer, born Hiroshima. He studied piano and composition in Tokyo and, in 1976, went to West Berlin to study composition with Isang Yun, piano with Rolf Kuhnert and music theory with Witold Szaloneck at the Hochschule der Künste. From 1983 to 1986, he studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. He has received many awards and prizes, including the First Prize in the Valentino Bucchi Composition Competition in Rome (1980), the Irino Prize for Young Composers (1982), the First Prize in the Composition Competition on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester (1982), the Arion Music Prize (1984), the Composition Prize of the Young Generation in Europe (1985), the Kyoto Music Prize (1988), the Otaka Prize (for "Ferne-Landschaft") in 1989, the Energia Music Award (1995) and in 1998 the Rheingau Musikpreis as well as the Music Prize of the city of Duisburg. Since 1990, Hosokawa has served as lecturer at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt every two years, and he was awarded the position of Composer-in-Residence at the Internationale Sommerakademie der Hochschule "Mozarteum" Salzburg in 1998. He has been invited to nearly all of the major contemporary festivals in Europe as a guest composer or lecturer. From 1989 to 1998 he served as Artistic Director for the annual Akiyoshidai International Contemporary Music Seminar and Festival. At the Münchner Biennale in 1998, his first opera "Vision of Lear", commissioned by the City of Munich for the festival, was premièred and highly acclaimed as "a work inspired by the encounter of East and West which has opened up a new musical world." His compositions include orchestral works and solo-concertos, chamber music, music for traditional Japanese Instruments and music for films. Hosokawa lives in Tokyo and Mainz.