Ishiguro, a mix of Austen and Kafka, wins Literature Nobel
British author Kazuo Ishiguro wins Nobel in Literature for his ‘novels of great emotional force’
Stockholm, Oct. 5: Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japaneseborn British novelist best known for The Remains of the Day and other works about memory’s pain and illusions, won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday.
Reacting to the news, Ishiguro told journalists at an impromptu press conference in his backyard in north London, “In this age of fake news, I thought it was a hoax... This is amazing and totally unexpected. It comes at a time when the world is uncertain about its values, its leadership and its safety. I just hope that receiving this huge honour will even in a small way encourage the forces for goodwill and peace at this time.”
Sara Danius, the academy’s permanent secretary, praised Ishiguro as a mix of Jane Austen — “her comedy of manners and her psychological insights” — and the dark undercurrents of Kafka. The academy called Ishiguro’s eight books works of emotional force that uncover “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
The selection of the 62year-old Ishiguro marked a return to citing fiction writers following two years of unconventional choices by the Swedish Academy for the $1.1 million prize.
Stockholm: Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of The Remains of the Day, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday, honouring an “exquisite novelist” a year after giving it to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
Born in Japan and raised in Britain, Mr Ishiguro, 62, won the Man Booker Prize for the 1989 novel that was made into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Anthony Hopkins as a fastidious and repressed butler in postwar Britain.
“He is an exquisite novelist. I would say if you mix Jane Austin and Franz Kafka you get Ishiguro in a nutshell, Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said.
The award of the $1.1 million prize marks a return to a more mainstream interpretation of literature after it went to the American troubadour Dylan, a decision that critics said snubbed more deserving writers.
The Academy hailed Mr Ishiguro’s ability to reveal “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world ... in novels of great emotional force” that touch on memory, time and self-delusion.
“What I’m interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have done things they later regret. I’m interested in how they come to terms with it,” told the New York Times after The Remains of the Day was published.
He has also waded into politics, calling a rise in hostility toward immigrants after the British voted to leave the European Union as “a fight over the very soul of Britain”.
“Never has there been a better opportunity, at least not since the 1930s, of pushing ... xenophobia into neo-Nazi racism,” he wrote in the Financial Times last year, urging “a sharply divided, bewildered, anxious, leaderless nation” to unite around its “essentially decent heart”.
Mr Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant, in which an elderly couple go on a road trip through an Arthurian England populated by ogres and dragons, “explores ... how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality”, the Academy said.