Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and was five when his family moved to Guildford, Surrey, where his father, an oceanographer, had been invited to work; he would not return to Japan until 1989. He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent, then took the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His thesis there became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), and he took British citizenship the following year.

His first two novels were set in a Japan largely imagined from childhood memory and family conversation. The Remains of the Day (1989), the Booker Prize–winning account of an English butler reviewing a life of service, refined the method that runs through all his work: a first-person narrator whose composure conceals as much as it reveals, so that the reader gradually perceives what the speaker cannot face. Later novels move freely across genre — the boarding-school elegy that is also speculative fiction in Never Let Me Go, the Arthurian mist of The Buried Giant, the artificial friend of Klara and the Sun — while holding to the same concerns: memory, dignity, self-deception and love.

The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in 2017 for novels of great emotional force that uncover the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world. He was knighted in 2018. He has also written lyrics for the jazz singer Stacey Kent, and his screenplay for the film Living earned an Academy Award nomination.