Kazuo Ishiguro Wins 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

Last week author, Kazuo Ishiguro received a call most only dream of. It probably went something like this:

Yes, Nobel Laureates find out via phone call just before the announcement telling us. The call can also come at any time, which has lead to previous embarrassment. Process aside, let’s learn more about the new Nobel Laureate.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary authors in the English-speaking world. He has been nominated for a Man Booker prize four times and won once. Two of his books have been made into films, and both Time Magazine and The Times have placed him on greatest author lists. In 1995, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Let’s hope there’s room on the shelf for the Nobel prize medallion.

Mr. Ishiguro’s books get placed in the fantasy, science fiction, and historical genres, and the BBC’s Arts Editor, Will Gompertz says of him: “He places the reader in some sort of alternative reality - which might be the future, it might be the present, it might be the past. They feel like places that are whole and real, but you don't know them. They're weird and not necessarily happy places. But they're places that you can inhabit and relate to, and you become deeply involved with the characters. That's the writer's job - he just does it better than most.”

In awarding the prize the Nobel committee praised Mr. Ishiguro’s latest book The Buried Giant, which was released in 2015, for exploring "how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality".

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Books

Mr. Ishiguro has written seven novels. The most well-known being The Remains of the Day: a beautiful and haunting meditation on life between the wars love denied, and the high cost of duty. Never Let Me Go is a novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss in an exclusive English boarding school. Both have been adapted into films.

The other novels are:

• A Pale View of Hills
• An Artist of the Floating World
• The Unconsoled
• When We Were Orphans

The 62-year-old writer said the Nobel prize award was "flabbergastingly flattering". Congratulations, Kazuo Ishiguro, and thank you for your stories. While a Nobel Prize may be flabbergastingly flattering, we think it’s well deserved.

Read more by Bianca Smith