The
Nobel Prize in
Literature for 2017 is awarded to the English author Kazuo Ishiguro
"who, in novels of great emotional force, has
uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
Kazuo
Ishiguro was born on November 8, 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan. The family moved
to the United Kingdom when he was five years old; he returned to visit his
country of birth only as an adult. In the late 1970s, Ishiguro graduated in
English and Philosophy at the University of Kent, and then went on to study
Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
Kazuo
Ishiguro has been a full-time author ever since his first book, A Pale
View of Hills (1982). Both his first novel and the subsequent one, An
Artist of the Floating World (1986) take place in Nagasaki a few years
after the Second World War. The themes Ishiguro is most associated with are
already present here: memory, time, and self-delusion. This is particularly
notable in his most renowned novel, The Remains of the Day (1989),
which was turned into film with Anthony Hopkins acting as the duty-obsessed
butler Stevens.
Ishiguro’s
writings are marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent
of whatever events are taking place. At the same time, his more recent fiction
contains fantastic features. With the dystopian work Never Let Me Go (2005),
Ishiguro introduced a cold undercurrent of science fiction into his work. In
this novel, as in several others, we also find musical influences. A striking
example is the collection of short stories titled Nocturnes: Five Stories
of Music and Nightfall (2009), where music plays a pivotal role in
depicting the characters’ relationships. In his latest novel, The Buried
Giant (2015), an elderly couple go on a road trip through an archaic
English landscape, hoping to reunite with their adult son, whom they have not
seen for years. This novel explores, in a moving manner, how memory relates to
oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality.
Apart
from his eight books, Ishiguro has also written scripts for film and
television.
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