Kazuo Ishiguro wins 2017 Nobel prize for literature

Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel literature prize.

The Nobel committee said the award had gone to the English author “who in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.

Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Nobel Academy, said:

“I would say that 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 and then you stir but not too much and then you have his writings.”

She said he had “developed an aesthetic universe all his own”.

The Japanese born British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer, was the 1989 winner of the Man Booker prize for his novel The Remains of the Day.

Mr Ishiguro, who is 62, came with his parents to England at the age of five. After working as a musician he studied creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia.

His first three novels were each about the consequences of the Second World War on individuals who had not fought in it but whose lives were affected by it.

He published his first novel in 1982, when he was 28. A Pale View of Hills was set in England and a war-devastated Nagasaki.

His second novel, which won the Whitbread book of the year in 1986, was the wonderfully subtle and melancholy An Artist of the Floating World, which was set in Japan.

Three years later The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize and made him famous. It became a critically acclaimed international bestseller and was adapted into a film by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant.

This early success liberated Mr Ishiguro. “Screenplays I didn’t really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I was just determined to write the books I had to write,” he said in 2005.

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Image source: Reuters