British author Kazuo Ishiguro wins Nobel Prize in Literature 2017

Some of Kazuo Ishiguro’s best-known works include Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. (Source: The Nobel Prize/ Twitter)

British author Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Oct 5, at a ceremony in Stockholm. The prize committee in Sweden said the award was given for the author’s works that uncovered “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

Though the author, now 62, was born in Japan in 1954, his family moved to Britain when he was only five-years-old. The Nobel Prize committee also said that Ishiguro was most associated with themes like memory, time and self-delusion.

Sara Danius, who is the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said on Thursday,” If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix. Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings.”

Sara Danius on Kazuo Ishiguro’s style: mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka – and “add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix.” #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/O3vbJOYF5B

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2017

Some of the author’s best-known works include Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, which Ishiguro wrote in just a month.

His latest book, The Buried Giant, was published in 2015 and the committee gushed with admiration over the way the novel explored, “how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality”. Praising the author’s former work, the committee said that Ishiguro introduced a ”cold undercurrent of science fiction into his work,” with “Never Let Me Go.”