Ishiguro, Kazuo (1954-…), is a Japanese-born British author whose novels deal with memory and the way people acknowledge the past amid times of cultural change. Ishiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), won the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s highest literary award. In 2017, Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his achievements in 2018.
The central character in The Remains of the Day is Stevens, a butler. During a motor trip, Stevens reflects on his career and gradually recognizes that his life has been a series of small failures and misplaced loyalties. Ishiguro tells his story with subtlety and lyricism. In 1993, the book became a highly praised motion picture starring Anthony Hopkins in the role of Stevens.
Ishiguro gained recognition with his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982). The novel concerns a Japanese woman who survived World War II (1939-1945) and now must deal with the suicide of her daughter.
Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), won the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa Literary Award), another British literary award. The story takes place in postwar Japan. The central character is a Japanese painter who struggles to adjust to the rapid Westernizing of his country’s culture.
In the novel The Unconsoled (1995), a famous pianist finds himself in an unfamiliar town for a concert he cannot remember arranging. The novel has a mysterious, dreamlike quality, as the author juggles time and space and cause and effect. When We Were Orphans (2000) is set in Shanghai, China, and describes a British man’s attempts to find his parents, who mysteriously disappeared when he was a child. Never Let Me Go (2005) is a science-fiction novel about human beings who are cloned to use their organs to eliminate disease. The Buried Giant (2015) is a fantasy about an elderly husband and wife who go on a journey to find their son, who disappeared mysteriously many years ago. Klara and the Sun (2021) portrays a near-future world as observed by Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend purchased as a companion for a seriously ill teenage girl. A short-story collection was published in 2009 as Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall.
Ishiguro was born on Nov. 8, 1954, in Nagasaki, Japan. He moved to England with his family in 1960. Ishiguro received a B.A. from the University of Kent in 1978 and an M.A. from the University of East Anglia in 1980.
