The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017 has been awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novels, according to the Nobel committee, “has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. The British writer joins the ranks of Nobel laureates like Bob Dylan, Alice Munro, Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, William Golding, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda.
Ishiguro is the author of seven novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005) and The Buried Giant (2015). He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times, winning with The Remains of the Day, which was later adapted into a 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, and nominated for eight Academy Awards. Never Let Me Go was also adapted into a film in 2010, and featured the actors Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, and moved with his family to Britain when he was five. He studied English and Philosophy at the University of Kent and gained a Master’s from the University of East Anglia’s creative writing course. Regarded as one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, Ishiguro’s 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. The Times newspaper included him on its of ‘The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945’ in 2008.
Photo by Jeff Cottenden/Courtesy of Knopf
