2017 Nobel Prize in Literature - Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese-born British Author, Wins Nobel Literature Prize

Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese-born British Author, Wins Nobel Literature Prize 2017

Who is Kazuo Ishiguro?

• Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, he moved to England with his family when his father was offered a post as an oceanographer in Surrey
• He read English and philosophy at the University of Kent after a gap year that included working as a grouse beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral
• He studied an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where his tutors were Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter
• His thesis became his critically acclaimed first novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982
• He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro - his books at a glance

• His first novel A Pale View of Hills was about a Japanese woman living in England trying to come to terms with her daughter's death
• He followed that with An Artist of the Floating World in 1986
• The Remains of the Day tells the story of a butler in a stately home whose boss was a Nazi sympathiser
• His only book of the 1990s was The Unconsoled, which was followed by When We Were Orphans in 2000
• 2005's Never Let Me Go followed a group of students at a boarding school living in a dystopian future. It was turned into a film starring Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan five years later
• Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall was a collection of stories published in 2009
• His most recent novel was The Buried Giant in 2015
• Ishiguro has also written a number of screenplays, including The White Countess and The Saddest Music in the World, as well as other short stories

Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of "The Remains of the Day", won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday for a run of "exquisite" novels that the award body said mixed Franz Kafka with Jane Austen.

The 62-year-old writer called the news "flabbergastingly flattering" and said he initially thought it was a hoax. He told reporters his wife had rushed home from the hairdressers after seeing reports on her phone.

"It comes at a time when the world is uncertain about its values, its leadership and its safety. I just hope that my receiving this huge honour will, even in a small way, encourage the forces for good,"Kazuo  Ishiguro said.

The award of the 9-million-crown ($1.1-million) prize marks a return to a more mainstream interpretation of literature a year after it went to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.

Kazuo Ishiguro is the first Briton to win the world's most prestigious literary award in a decade, since Doris Lessing's recognition in 2007.
He said he was sitting in the kitchen when his agents called and let him listen in to the Nobel announcement live over the phone, without knowing he would win.

"I thought it was a hoax, in this time of fake news. So I asked them to check up," he said at his north London home.


"Eventually a very nice lady called from Sweden and asked me first of all if I would accept it ... I was surprised at how low-key they were, it was like they were inviting me to some kind of party."

Kazuo Ishiguro's best-known work, "The Remains of the Day", won the 1989 Man Booker Prize and became an Oscar-nominated movie starring Anthony Hopkins as a fastidious and repressed butler in postwar Britain.

"He is an exquisite novelist. I would say if you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka you get Ishiguro in a nutshell," Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which chooses the literature winner, told

The Academy hailed Ishiguro's ability to reveal "the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world ... in novels of great emotional force" that touch on memory, time and self-delusion.

Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel, "The Buried Giant", in which an elderly couple go on a road trip through an Arthurian England populated by ogres and dragons, "explores ... how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality," the Academy said.

He told reporters he was currently in discussions to work on a graphic novel.

Ishiguro was born in Japan and raised in Britain.

“I've always said throughout my career that although I've grown up in this country and I'm educated in this country, that a large part of my way of looking at the world, my artistic approach, is Japanese, because I was brought up by Japanese parents, speaking in Japanese," he said on Thursday.

Ishiguro has waded into British politics during his career, calling a rise in hostility towards immigrants after the Brexit vote "a fight over the very soul of Britain".

He takes his place beside past winners including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway.