Kazuo Ishiguro

It’s the call many novelists dream of, but Kazuo Ishiguro didn’t see it coming, said

and in TheGuardian .com. When his agent phoned last week telling him he’d just been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, Ishiguro worried he was being pranked— until he noticed a crowd of journalists gathered outside his London home. Even then, he insisted he wasn’t sure he deserved the honor. “Part of me feels bad that I’ve got this before other living writers,” he said. “Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, all of them immediately came into my head.” He also worried that he was too young to be so honored. “Then I suddenly realized that I’m 62,” he says. “So I am the average age for this, I suppose.”

Ishiguro has been full of surprises his entire career, said

in the Los Angeles Times. He’s “that rarest of creatures—a literary craftsman who also sells books.” After writing two novels set in Japan, the country he lived in until age 5, he gained international attention with 1989’s The Remains of the Day and its incisive take on the British class system. Later, in Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant, he ventured boldly into science fiction and fantasy. Still, the author rates as a more conventional Nobel laureate than Bob Dylan, whose win last year provoked some tut-tutting among purists. Ishiguro, who wanted to be a folk singer back in the ’70s, isn’t one of them. “He’s probably my biggest hero,” he says. “I do a very good Bob Dylan impersonation, but I won’t do it for you right now.”