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Kazuo Ishiguro Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature Kazuo Ishiguro Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
(about 1 hour later)
The English author Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for what the prize committee in Sweden said were works that uncovered “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” The English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, known for his spare yet emotionally resonate prose style and his inventive subversion of literary genres, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
The committee said on Twitter that Mr. Ishiguro, 62, who moved to Britain from Japan when he was 5 years old, was most associated with the themes of memory, time and self-delusion. Mr. Ishiguro, 62, is best known for his novels “The Remains of the Day,” about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go,” a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school. He has obsessively returned to the same themes in his novels, which are often written in the first person, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time.
“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said on Thursday. “Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings.” “If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” said Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of The Swedish Academy. “Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings.”
Ms. Danius described Mr. Ishiguro as a writer of great integrity. “He doesn’t look to the side,” she said. “He has developed an aesthetic universe all his own.” Ms. Danius described Mr. Ishiguro as “a writer of great integrity.”
“The Remains of the Day,” perhaps the author’s best-known work, won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was turned into an Academy-award nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins as the butler Stevens. “He doesn’t look to the side,” she said. “He has developed an aesthetic universe all his own.”
The novel, told from the point of view of a butler overseeing an English manor house in the years leading up to World War II, wrestled with notions of loyalty, love, dignity and legacy. Born in 1954 in Nagasaki but educated in Britain, Kazuo Ishiguro is known for, among other things, his lyrical prose, his acute sense of place and for his masterful parsing of the British class system.
Of particular poignancy was the butler’s relationship with the manor’s housekeeper, Miss Kenton, which had the whiff of romance about it but was suppressed and stifled by the butler. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it “an intricate and dazzling novel.” Mr. Ishigiro was born in Japan the son of an oceanographer, and moved to Surrey when he was 5 years old, and attended Woking Grammar School, a school that he told The Guardian was “probably the last chance to get a flavor of a bygone English society that was already rapidly fading.”
“Never Let Me Go,” Mr. Ishiguro’s 2005 dystopian work, centers on the lives of three children who, at first, appear to be typical friends growing up together at an English boarding school. The reality at the heart of the novel was far darker and more disturbing, the horror of their reality teased out piece by piece. In an interview with The Times two years ago, Mr. Ishiguro said that he had discovered literature as a young boy when he came upon Sherlock Holmes stories in the local library. “I was around 9 or 10, and I not only read obsessively about Holmes and Watson, I started to behave like them. I’d go to school and say things like: ‘Pray, be seated’ or ‘That is most singular.’ People at the time just put this down to my being Japanese,” he said, adding that he was attracted to the world of Conan Doyle because it was “so very cozy.” It helped ignite his interest in literature.
Mr. Ishiguro introduced “a cold undercurrent of science fiction into his work,” with “Never Let Me Go,” the committee said in its statement. Ms. Kakutani praised the author for his artful ability to “not only assemble a chilling jigsaw puzzle, but also create a distinct fictional world.” After studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, he spent a year writing fiction, eventually gaining a master of arts in creative writing under the tutelage of writers such as Malcolm Bardbury and Angela Carter. He has also written lyrics for the American jazz singer Stacey Kent and plays the guitar.
The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was the basis of a 2010 film starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield. “My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously,” he told The Guardian in an interview. “ My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation. We would endlessly discuss the relationship between words and music and how they had to come alive within the context of performance.”
“Ishiguro’s writings are marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place,” the prize committee wrote in a statement after the announcement. “At the same time, his more recent fiction contains fantastic features.” Mr. Ishiguro stood out early among the literary crowd. In 1983, he was included in Granta’s best of young British writers list, joining luminaries such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.
In assessing his latest novel, “The Buried Giant,” (2015), the committee praised the novel for the way it explored, “in a moving manner, how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality.” His deep understanding of the social conventions and affectations of his adopted homeland were conveyed in his third novel, “Remains of the Day” which won the prestigious Booker prize and depicted a buttoned-up butler, who was later immortalized in a film by the same name starring Anthony Hopkins. Mr. Ishiguro later said he had written the book in four weeks at the age of 32.
Mr. Ishiguro studied English and Philosophy at the University of Kent in England the 1970s, and studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a full-time author and publishing his first book, “A Pale View of Hills,” in 1982. Describing the writing process for the book that cemented his literary stardom and labeling the process “the Crash,” he wrote in The Guardian: “Throughout the Crash, I wrote freehand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere — I let them remain and plowed on.”
In a 1989 interview with The Times, Mr. Ishiguro talked about bucking stereotypes after the success of “The Remains of the Day.” He published his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills, about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England, in 1982, and followed with “An Artist of the Floating World,” narrated by an elderly Japanese painter, set in post-World War II Japan. When he wrote “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Ishiguro worried that he was repeating himself by writing another first person novel with an unreliable narrator, but critics saw the book as an extreme departure.
“What I don’t want to do is get repetitive or even stylistically be imprisoned by what people have said I do well,” he said. “I’d maybe like to write a messy, jagged, loud kind of book.” “I was afraid that people would say, ‘Oh, it’s the same book again, about an old guy looking back over his life with regret when it’s too late to change thing,’ ” he said in a 2015 interview with The Times. “Instead, they were saying, ‘Your books are always set in Japan; this is a giant leap for you.’ I get this with almost every book.”
A literary iconoclast, Mr. Ishiguro has played with genres like detective fiction, westerns, science fiction and fantasy in his novels. Critics viewed “The Unconsoled,” a surreal, dreamlike novel about a pianist in an unnamed European city, as magical realism when it came out in 1995. “When We Were Orphans” was viewed as a detective novel. His 2005 novel, “Never Let Me Go,” was regarded as yet another stylistic leap into futuristic science fiction, although it was set in the 1990s.
His most recent novel, “The Buried Giant,” defied expectations once again. A fantasy story set in Arthurian Britain, the novel centers on an older couple, Axl and Beatrice, who leave their village in search of their missing son, and encounter an old knight. Though the story was a full blown fantasy, with ogres and a dragon, it was also a parable that explored many of the themes that have preoccupied Mr. Ishiguro throughout his career, including the fragile nature of individual and collective memory.
In selecting Mr. Ishiguro, the Swedish academy, which has been criticized in the past for using the prize to make a political statement, seemed to be focused on pure literary merit.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work rather than a single title. Past winners have included international literary giants like Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. In other years, the academy has selected obscure European writers whose work was not widely read in English, including French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio (2008), the Romanian-German writer Herta Müller (2009), the Swedish poet and translator Tomas Transtromer (2011) and the French novelist Patrick Modiano (2014).
Of the 114 winners who have received the prize since it was first awarded in 1901, 14 have been women.
Recently, the academy has often overlooked novelists and poets in favor of writers working in unconventional forms. Last year, the prize went to the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” a choice that infuriated some traditionalists. In 2015, the Nobel went to the Belarusian journalist and prose writer Svetlana Alexievich, who is known for her expansive oral histories, and in 2013, the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro won.
■ Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discoveries about the molecular mechanisms controlling the body’s circadian rhythm.■ Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discoveries about the molecular mechanisms controlling the body’s circadian rhythm.
■ Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.■ Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.
■ Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing a new way to construct precise three-dimensional images of biological molecules.■ Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing a new way to construct precise three-dimensional images of biological molecules.
Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of the of the rock era who sold millions of records with dense, enigmatic songwriting, was recognized with the award, an honor that elevated him into the company of T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett. Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of the of the rock era who sold millions of records with dense, enigmatic songwriting, was recognized with the award, an honor that elevated him into the company of T.S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett.
Two more will be awarded in the days to come:Two more will be awarded in the days to come:
■ The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Norway. Read about last year’s winner, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia.■ The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Norway. Read about last year’s winner, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia.
■ The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science will be announced on Monday, in Sweden. Read about last year’s winners, Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom.■ The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science will be announced on Monday, in Sweden. Read about last year’s winners, Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom.