Nobel prize in literature 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017 is awarded to the English author Kazuo Ishiguro

"who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

Japan-born Ishiguro won the Man Booker Prize for the 1989 novel that was made into an Oscar-nominated movie. The Swedish Academy hailed his ability to reveal “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.

Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL (石黒 一雄; born 8 November 1954) is a Nobel Prize winning British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan; his family moved to England in 1960 when he was five. Ishiguro graduated from the University of Kent with a bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy in 1978 and gained his master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980.

Ishiguro is considered one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations and winning the 1989 award for his novel The Remains of the Day. His 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time as the best novel of 2005 and included in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His seventh novel, The Buried Giant, was published in 2015. Growing up in a Japanese family in the UK was crucial to his writing, as he says, enabling him to see things from a different perspective to many of his British peers.

In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

The works of Ishiguro, who moved to Britain as a young child, often touch on memory, time and self-delusion, the Academy said.

“He is a little bit like a mix of Jane Austen, comedy of manners and Franz Kafka. If you mix this a little, not too much, you get Ishiguro in a nutshell,” said Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.

Ishiguro began to gain attention in the 1980s for works such as “A Pale View of the Hills” and won global fame for “The Remains of the Day,” a story of a fastidious and repressed butler in postwar Britain. The movie version starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

Ishiguro takes his place beside Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Doris Lessing and Ernest Hemingway as winner of the world’s most prestigious literary award.

Critics said the decision to give last year’s prize to Dylan was a snub to more deserving candidates and strayed beyond what is traditionally deemed literature.

The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.

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