British novelist Ishiguro wins Nobel Literature Prize
NEW YORK—Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born British novelist who in “The Remains of the Day” and other novels captured memory’s lasting pain and dangerous illusions in precise and elegant prose, won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday.
The selection of the 62-year-old Ishiguro marked a return to citing fiction writers after two years of unconventional choices by the Swedish Academy for the 9-million-kronor ($1.1 million) prize. It also continues a recent trend of giving the award to British authors born elsewhere— Naipaul, the 2001 winner, is from Trinidad and Tobago; the 2007 honoree, Doris Lessing, was a native of Iran who grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
“Some of the themes that I have tried to tackle in my work—about history, about not just personal memory but the way countries and nations and communities remember their past, and how often they bury the uncomfortable memories from the past—I hope that these kinds of themes will actually be in some small way helpful to the climate we have at the moment,” Ishiguro said Thursday, speaking in his backyard in north London.
Ishiguro already was one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, winning the Booker for “The Remains of the Day,” receiving an Order of the British Empire medal and appearing frequently on lists of the country’s greatest authors. The academy called Ishiguro’s eight books, which also include “An Artist of the Floating World” and “The Buried Giant,” works of emotional force that uncover “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but moved to England as a boy after his father, an oceanographer, was invited by the head of the British National Institute of Oceanography. An admirer of “Jane Eyre” from early on, he also is a longtime fan of comics and said Thursday that he was “in discussions” about working on a graphic novel.
He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent and found an early mentor in Malcolm Bradbury, who taught creative writing at the University of East Anglia. After a few false starts, Ishiguro completed his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills,” narrated by a Japanese woman whose daughter has committed suicide. Both his debut work and the Booker-nominated “An Artist of the Floating World” centered on Japanese characters.