Haru Yamada

About the Author

Haru Yamada is a sociolinguistics researcher and writer with a PhD from Georgetown University. A distinction of her doctoral dissertation on conversational analysis of bankers’ meetings led to the publication of American and Japanese Business Discourse, where she introduced the idea of speaker- and listener-led conversations. Developing her concept of listener-led conversations in a publication with Oxford University Press, she published Different Games, Different Rules with a foreword by New York Times best-selling author Deborah Tannen. She regularly talks at academic conferences.

Haru’s life mission is to champion listening, in many ways enforced by a serious accident which left her nearly deaf and with a lifelong hearing disability. While hearing loss isn’t ideal in someone who spends their time listening, this personal challenge bolsters much of her everyday life and informs the book, making listening a thoughtful part of daily practice, drawing from skills she acquired from over seven international moves before attending university, and further moves as a working adult. She currently lives in London with her French partner, two multilingual, biracial, multicultural children in a hybrid working, bigenerational home.