BRITISH AUTHOR KAZUO ISHIGURO WINS NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
NEW DELHI: The Nobel Literature Prize for 2017 has been awarded to English writer Kazuo Ishiguro. The Swedish Academy, while making the announcement on Thursday, said Ishiguro has written “novels of great emotional force” and “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
With eight books and several screen plays and short stories to his credit, Ishiguro is among the most celebrated contemporary writers. He won the Man Booker Prize in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day, which was also adapted for the big screen, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Ishiguro told the BBC that winning the Nobel was a “magnificent honour” and “flabbergastingly flattering”.
“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.
“The world is in a very uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel prizes would be a force for something positive in the world as it is at the moment,” he said.
His other bestselling work Never Let Me Go was adapted into a 2010 film starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield.
While Ishiguro is best known for exploring themes such as memory, time and self-delusion, he introduced a “cold undercurrent of science fiction into his work” with Never Let Me Go in 2005, said the Academy.
His latest novel, The Buried Giant was published in 2015 and dealt with how “memory relates to oblivion, history to the present and fantasy to reality”.
His publisher Faber & Faber earlier tweeted: “We’re THRILLED Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize!”
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and his family moved to the UK when he was five years old.
The themes Ishiguro is most associated with are already present here: memory, time, and selfdelusion... Ishiguro’s writings are marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place
SWEDISH ACADEMY, which chooses the Nobel Laureate in Literature