Briton bags Nobel Prize for literature

STOCKHOLM: Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of The Remains of the Day, won the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday for a run of “exquisite” novels that the Swedish Academy said “mixed Franz Kafka with Jane Austen”.

The writer said winning the award was “flabbergastingly flattering”. He told the BBC he first heard about it in the media, and his wife had rushed home from the hairdressers after seeing it on her phone.

“It comes at a time when the world is uncertain about its values, its leadership and its safety. I just hope that my receiving this huge honour will, even in a small way, encourage the forces for good,” he told reporters at his house in north London.

The award of the nine million-crown (RM4.6 million) prize marks a return to a more mainstream interpretation of literature a year after it went to singersongwriter Bob Dylan.

Ishiguro is the first Briton to win the world’s most prestigious literary award in a decade, since Doris Lessing’s recognition in 2007.

The 62-year-old was born in Japan and raised in Britain. His best-known work, The Remains of the Day, won the 1989 Man Booker Prize and became 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 Austen and Franz Kafka you get Ishiguro in a nutshell,” Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said.

The Academy hailed 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,” he told the New York Times after The Remains of the Day was published.

Ishiguro takes his place beside past winners including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway. – Reuters