Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to British author Kazuo Ishiguro

62-year old English author Kazuo Ishiguro has been awarded the Nobel Literature prize for 2017.

Mr. Ishiguro 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.

 “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, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.In a career that spans some 35 years, Mr. Ishiguro has gained wide recognition for his stark, emotionally restrained prose. His novels are often written in the first person, with unreliable narrators who are in denial about truths that are gradually revealed to the reader. He has obsessively returned to the same themes in his work, including the fallibility of memory, self-delusion,  mortality and the porous nature of time.

The writer said that the award was “flabbergastingly flattering”. He said:

“It’s a magnificent honour, mainly because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived, so that’s a terrific commendation.”

Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki to Japanese parents. But the family moved to England in 1960 when his father got a job as an oceanographer in Surrey.

Congratulations, Mr Ishiguro!

"The Remains of the Day" official trailer  (1993)

"Never Let Me Go" official trailer  (2010)