I thought it was a hoax! UK writer is awarded Nobel prize
A BRITISH author has won the Nobel Prize for literature – and he has admitted he had feared it was a hoax.
Kazuo Ishiguro yesterday became the first British winner in a decade, and only the 11th British laureate of the literature prize in its 116-year history.
Ishiguro, 62, was born in Japan but moved to England as a child. He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains Of The Day, which was adapted into a Oscar-nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Yesterday he said he was ‘embarrassed’ to have been chosen ahead of other great writers, but admitted it was ‘flabbergastingly flattering’.
Speaking of the moment he learned he had won the £832,000 prize, Ishiguro, who also wrote Never Let Me Go, told the BBC: ‘In this age of false news, I thought it was perhaps a mistake.’
Past British laureates of the literature prize include Sir Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling, William Golding and Harold Pinter. The last British winner was Doris Lessing in 2007.
Earlier this week, British scientist Richard Henderson, 72, shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with two others for his work on electron microscopes.
THE late Robert Robinson, TV and radio quiz master par excellence, had a trick up his sleeve for keeping his panels entertained during any of the usual technical hitches that happened during recording. He would recite, from memory, a list of people’s names and ask if anyone knew what they had in common.
almost no one ever got it right. They were all past winners of the Nobel Prize for literature and nobody had ever heard of any of them. Bob would have had a tougher job now, since the Nobel Prize was won by, among other well-known writers, Harold Pinter and Doris lessing.
The 2017 winner’s name, Kazuo Ishiguro, may not be quite as universally familiar as that of last year’s, Bob Dylan, but among readers of good fiction he stands tall.
lovers of cinema know him for the magnificent film The Remains Of The Day, adapted from his book of the same name and starring anthony Hopkins and emma Thompson.
That is probably Ishiguro’s most famous and certainly his most successful book. It is one of those perfect and perfectly unexpected ones which came from left field after the more likely ones about Japan – an artist Of The Floating World and a Pale View Of The Hills.
He was born in Nagasaki of Japanese parents but they came to england when he was five, so that his father could do further research into his subject – oceanography.
Kazuo won a place at Woking County Grammar school, then Kent University and afterwards did an Ma in Creative Writing at the University of east anglia. The late writer and academic Malcolm Bradbury, co-founder of this, the first and most successful of all such Ma courses, talked to me about it in its early days and singled out Ishiguro as one of the best writers he had ever taught, and absolutely certain to go far.
When it was announced, many writers who use Twitter exclaimed with delight that ‘it couldn’t have happened to a nicer man’.
The Nobel Prize is not awarded for niceness of course, but it’s true. In the late 1980s, I interviewed Ishiguro for the BBC Radio programme Book shelf.
In the previous few weeks, I had had a basinful of over-promoted, spoilt but not good writers, who came into the studio accompanied by publicists and minders, so I was wary of meeting this young man whose books had garnered so much early praise.
I need not have been. He came into Broadcasting House alone, he was earnest, quietly and rather quickly spoken, and absolutely charming. He had no airs, no side.
He took his own work seriously, as any writer should, but the high opinions of him had not left a mark on the man himself. I took to him at once and he became my benchmark of how to behave when interviewed.
The other thing being said everywhere today is how good it is to have a Prize winner whose books one can actually read and enjoy.
Of course not all past Nobel laureates have been difficult – alice Munro, who won in 2013, has a clear, simple prose style, with all her richness and subtlety conveyed easily through it.
Ishiguro’s novels are deeply rewarding to read and re-read.
ATHOUGH never shying away from complex subjects and multi-layered meaning, the books are also beautifully clear and elegantly written.
The Remains Of The Day is a book whose prose style marries perfectly with both characters and narration.
stevens is a butler who worked in a mansion, the story is told by him as a diary and has a restraint and a cool formality, both of which conceal past secrets. He tells us about his past life, and then the story is brought up to the present.
It is mainly about stevens himself, but also about his relationship with his former colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton, who towards the end surprises him with a revelation that unsettles him deeply.
It is a novel of beauty and tragedy which clings to the walls of the reader’s mind, one whose atmosphere never quite fades, even after many years.
If his next novel, The Unconsoled, is not his most approachable, the plot mirrors the bewilderment of the hero, a famous pianist who is giving a concert in an unnamed european city and becomes mired in confusion, his own mind seemingly fragmenting.
When We Were Orphans, set in shanghai in the early 20th century, is the opposite, a tightly plotted, clever, fastmoving book which sucks the reader in and holds very tight.
The parents of a boy disappear and he is sent from China to relatives in england, where he grows up and turns detective, to solve the mystery of what happened to them.
Next came Never let Me Go, also made into a film and set in an english boarding school which becomes more and more sinister. The Buried Giant, Ishiguro’s most recent book, took him ten years to write and left some critics baffled.
Perhaps they just do not like fables and fairy stories – for that is what this unique, very beautiful and moving book really is. It is set in arthurian Britain and tells the story of a loving couple, axl and Beatrice, who become outcasts from their community.
Few novelists can produce something different and surprising every time, and make a masterpiece of it. But Kazuo Ishiguro is one. His name won’t become a forgotten one like those on Robert Robinson’s list.
Susan Hill is author of The Woman In Black. Her latest book, Jacob’s Room Is Full Of Books, is published this month