Literature Nobel Prize for UK Novelist

Japanese-British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, 62, won the 2017 Nobel Prize in literature.

The author takes the award for his “novels of great emotional force.” He was the winner of Man Booker Prize for his 1989 novel ‘The Remains of the Day’. His other famous work is the 2005 dystopian sci-fi novel ‘Never Let Me Go’ which was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Ishiguro said he was both honored and “taken completely by surprise” after he was named this year’s winner of the 2017 Nobel prize in literature, even initially wondering if the announcement was a case of “fake news”.

Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Ishiguro is a writer “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world,” CNN reported.

Ishiguro, whose family moved to Britain from Japan when he was 5, has written eight books, the most recent of which, “The Buried Giant,” was published in 2015.

“I don’t think it will sink in for a long time,” Ishiguro said of the honor in a phone interview with the Swedish Academy. “I mean, it’s a prestigious honor, in as far as these kinds of things go.”

The author said: “One of the things that interested me always is how we live in small worlds and big worlds at the same time; that we have a personal arena in which we have to try and find fulfillment and love. But that inevitably intersects with a larger world, where politics or even dystopian universes can prevail.”

“If you mix (English novelist) Jane Austen and (Czech writer) Franz Kafka, then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell,” Danius told reporters of this year’s winner. “But you have to add a little bit of (French novelist) Marcel Proust into the mix, and then you stir but not too much, and then you have his writings”.

“At the same time, he’s a writer of great integrity who doesn’t look to the side. He’s developed an aesthetic universe of his own. He is someone who is very interested in understanding the past and writes about what you’ve had to forget to survive in the first place, as an individual and as a society,” said Danius.

A considerable number of Ishiguro’s works have been translated into Persian and published in Iran, namely ‘Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall’, ‘The Remains of the Day’, ‘The Unconsoled’, ‘The Buried Giant’, ‘When We Were Orphans’, ‘Never Let Me Go’ and ‘An Artist of the Floating World’