Kazuo Ishiguro, the masterful British novelist behind such beloved works as The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, is this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
“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,” said Sara Danius, on behalf of The Swedish Academy. “Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings.”
Ishiguro is a native of Nagasaki, Japan, but was raised and educated in England. Part of a movement of exciting young British writers that included Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan, he achieved his first wide success with his third novel, The Remains of the Day, which he claims to have written in about a month. (What’d you do last month?) The book, which won the 1989 Booker Prize, was adapted into an acclaimed motion picture, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, in 1993.
His other books include A Pale View of the Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, The Buried Giant, and Never Let Me Go, which was also adapted into a film in 2010.