Biography Of Hiromu Arakawa

Hiromi Arakawa recognised by her artist name Hiromu Arakawa is a Japanese manga artist.
She was born in 1973 in Tokachi, a sub-prefecture in the northernmost island of Japan,
Hokkaido. Her birth name is Hiromi 弘美, the first character is the same as her male writer
name, Hiromu.
Her family owned a dairy and potatoes farm she was raised with her three elder sisters and
one younger brother. As a child, Arakawa dreamed of discovering what was beyond the farms
and looked up to the mangaka profession (manga writer) as being ideal, “light” and carefree.
During her school years, she often drew on textbooks, as a teenager, she helped her parents
at the farm chores and played in the fields. She went to an agricultural high school and, as
she graduated, agreed with her parents she would help them at the farm for 7 years and, in
this meantime, would take regular oil painting lessons at the town. As that period ended, she
moved to Tokyo to pursue her dream of becoming a mangaka and said to her parents she
would only return home once she was able to make a living out of manga.

She said manga had always been among her hobbies and she collected manga of all genres.
One of the first paid jobs Arakawa had as a mangaka was making short four panels comics
(4koma) for a magazine called Gamest, where she made parodies of the games portrayed in
the issues of the magazine. She worked as a manga writer with her friend Zhang Fei Long.
Ideas from this fanzine would be later incorporated into the manga Hero Tales.
Since then she won:
1999: 9th 21st Century Enix Award for Stray Dog.
2003: 49th Shogakukan Manga Award, Shōnen category for Fullmetal Alchemist.
2011: 15th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, “New Artist Prize” category.
2011: 42nd Seiun Award, “Best Science Fiction Comic” category for Fullmetal Alchemist.
She is best known for the manga Fullmetal Alchemist, which became a hit internationally, and
was adapted into two anime television series. Married and mother of two children, Arakawa
has secured a contract with Shogakukan’s Weekly Shōnen Sunday in 2011 and is currently
publishing the first non-fantasy series of her career, Gin no Saji.She is currently living in Tokyo
and has published more works, including Raiden 18, Sōten no Kōmori (also known as Bat in
Blue Sky), and Hero Tales. Arakawa has collaborated with the creation of Hero Tales with
Studio Flag under the name of Huang Jin Zhou. She never made one appearance in public to
receive awards and she even paid an actress to receive her awards.