Kazuo Ishiguro Follow

Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. He is best known for his novels The Remains of the Day, about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and Never Let Me Go, a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school. The New York Times wrote: “He has obsessively returned to the same themes in his work, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time. His body of work stands out for his inventive subversion of literary genres, his acute sense of place and his masterly parsing of the British class system.

“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” an official of the Swedish Academy added.

Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, he moved to Great Britain in 1960. He attended the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of East Anglia. He now lives in London.

Ishiguro is also the author of the novels A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Primio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and a book of stories, Nocturnes (2009). He won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day (1989). He received an OBE for Services to Literature in 1995, and the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998.

Profile photo by Frankie Fouganthin (CC BY SA 4.0)