WHAT’S THE STORY?
KAZUO Ishiguro was yesterday named as the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. Although he was born in Nagasaki in Japan, he moved with his parents to the UK at the age of five in 1960 and has long been a British citizen.
WHAT DID HE WIN FOR?
AS the citation from the Swedish Academy made clear, it was his novels – he has also written for the screen - above all that won him the prize of nine million Swedish krona (£832,000).
They include The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.
The citation read that 62-year-old Ishiguro, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
A BRIEF STORY OF HIS LIFE
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.
His first novel A Pale View of Hills was published in 1982, and he became a full-time writer thereafter.
According to the Academy “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 a film with Anthony Hopkins acting as the duty-obsessed butler Stevens.”
The Unconsoled (1995) and When We Were Orphans (2000) did not receive the same critical acclaim, though the latter was nominated for the Booker Prize which he had won with The Remains of the Day.
The Academy added: “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.”
WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING ABOUT HIS WIN?
IN all, Ishiguro has published eight novels, all of them produced by Faber & Faber who were understandably ecstatic yesterday. Stephen Page of Faber & Faber said: “He has an emotional force as well as an intellectual curiosity, that always finds enormous numbers of readers. His work is challenging at times, and stretching, but because of that emotional force, it so often resonates with readers. He’s a literary writer who is very widely read around the world.”
Former poet laureate Andrew Motion said: “Ishiguro’s imaginative world has the great virtue and value of being simultaneously highly individual and deeply familiar – a world of puzzlement, isolation, watchfulness, threat and wonder”.
Motion asked: “How does he do it? Among other means, by resting his stories on founding principles which combine a very fastidious kind of reserve with equally vivid indications of emotional intensity. It’s a remarkable and fascinating combination, and wonderful to see it recognised by the Nobel prize-givers.”
Former booker prize winner Salman Rushdie said: “Many congratulations to my old friend Ish, whose work I’ve loved and admired ever since I first read A Pale View of Hills. And he plays the guitar and writes songs too! Roll over Bob Dylan.”
A WORTHY SUCCESSOR TO DYLAN, THEN
AS Rushdie’s remarks reminded us, there was plenty controversy when Dylan got the prize last year. Ishiguro himself said yesterday: “I do a very good Bob Dylan impersonation!”
The 110th Nobel laureate for literature follows fellow Britons Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, Seamus Heaney (born in Northern Ireland but latterly resident in Dublin), William Golding, Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, John Galsworthy, George Bernard Shaw, and Rudyard Kipling on the list of honour.
The man himself said yesterday: “I have to say, you know, it’s great to come one year after Bob Dylan who was my hero since the age of 13.”
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