Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most loved and celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the world. (Image: Nobel Prize/Twitter)
Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to British author Kazuo Ishiguro. The Swedish Academy wrote about the 62-year-old, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Ishiguro, born in Japan, is known for novels such as A Pale View of Hills (1982), The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005). His most recent book The Buried Giant was published in the year 2015. The top contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 were Japan’s Haruki Murakami and Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Ishiguro is one of the most loved and celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the world. He has received four Man Booker Prize nominations till now and won it in 1989 for his novel ‘The Remains of the Day’. Born in Nagasaki in the year 1954, Ishuguru became a British citizen in 1982. While Ishiguro has gone on record to say that Marcel Proust and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have been his greatest influences, he has often been compared to contemporaries Sulman Rushdie. His book Never Let Me Go, is in the list of Time Magazine’s list of the 100 greatest English language novels.
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A number of his novels are set in the past. For example, in his novel Never Let Me Go written in 2005, he has used a futuristic tone yet it is set in the 1980s and 1990s. Even Remains of the Day is set in the World War II era. In his novels, Ishiguro has usually used a first-person narrative style and his protagonists are flawed human beings. His characters implicitly narrate the human failings, using which Ishiguro generates a sense of pathos which makes the reader sympathise with the characters. Interestingly, most of his works have endings without a feeling of resolution, as if in a cover of melancholic resignation.
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The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded for a total of 110 times to 114 Nobel Laureates, The awards started in the year 1901. The choice by the committee this year may come as good news for the hardcore literature fans, as the Nobel Prize in this field has been a little experimental in the last couple of years. In 2015, the award went to Belarus’ Svetlana Alexievich, for her journalistic and non-fiction works. She had been working on topics regarding the Soviet Union crisis. Meanwhile, the most adventurous choice was in 2016, when surprisingly American singer Bob Dylan was awarded literature’s most prestigious accolade.
