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Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel prize in literature 2017 Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel prize in literature 2017
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The English author Kazuo Ishiguro has been named winner of the 2017 Nobel prize in literature, praised by the Swedish Academy for his “novels of great emotional force”, which it said had “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. The British author Kazuo Ishiguro said he was both honoured 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”.
With names including Margaret Atwood, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami leading the odds at the bookmakers, Ishiguro was a surprise choice. But his blue-chip literary credentials return the award to more familiar territory after last year’s controversial selection of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The author of novels including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro’s writing, said the Academy, is “marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place”. Ishiguro, author of novels including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, was praised by the Swedish Academy for novels which “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” and were driven by a “great emotional force”.
Speaking on Thursday afternoon, the writer said it was “amazing and totally unexpected news”. Despite being among those tipped for the prize, whose previous winners include Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing and Pablo Neruda, Ishiguro told the Guardian he had been completely unprepared for the announcement and had even doubted at first if it was true.
“It comes at a time when the world is uncertain about its values, its leadership and its safety,” Ishiguro said. “I just hope that my receiving this huge honour will, even in a small way, encourage the forces for goodwill and peace at this time.” “You’d think someone would tell me first but none of us had heard anything,” said Ishiguro, who had been sitting at his kitchen table at home in Golders Green about to have brunch, when he got the call from his agent.
Ishiguro’s fellow Booker winner Salman Rushdie – who is also regularly named as a potential Nobel laureate – was one of the first to congratulate him. “Many congratulations to my old friend Ish, whose work I’ve loved and admired ever since I first read A Pale View of Hills,” Rushdie said. “And he plays the guitar and writes songs too! Roll over Bob Dylan.” “It was completely not something I expected, otherwise I would have washed my hair this morning,” he said with a laugh. “It was absolute chaos. My agent phoned to say it sounded like they had just announced me as the Nobel winner, but there’s so much fake news about these days it’s hard to know who or what to believe so I didn’t really believe it until journalists started calling and lining up outside my door.”
According to the former poet laureate Andrew Motion, “Ishiguro’s imaginative world has the great virtue and value of being simultaneously highly individual and deeply familiar – a world of puzzlement, isolation, watchfulness, threat and wonder”. Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki in Japan but moved to the UK when he was five said he was “tremendously proud” to receive the award and emphasised how much he hoped it would be a force for good at a time of global instability.
“This is a very weird time in the world, we’ve sort of lost faith in our political system, we’ve lost faith in our leaders, we’re not quite sure of our values, and I just hope that my winning the nobel prize contributes something that engenders good will and peace,” he said. “ It reminds us of how international the world is, and we all have to contribute things from our different corners of the world.”
With names including Margaret Atwood, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami leading the odds at the bookmakers, Ishiguro was a surprise choice and he admitted one of his first thoughts had jumped to fellow living author he felt were equally deserving of a Nobel.
“Part of me feels like an imposter and part of me feels bad that I’ve got this before other living writers,” said Ishiguro. “Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, all of them immediately came into my head and I just thought wow, this is a bit of a cheek for me to have been given this before them.
“And because I’m completely delusional, part of me feels like I’m too young to be winning something like this. But then I suddenly realised that i’m 62, so I am average age for this I suppose”
However, any concerns of Ishiguro’s win creating friction in the literary world were quickly appeased as authors such as Rushdie were among the first to offer their congratulations. “Many congratulations to my old friend Ish, whose work I’ve loved and admired ever since I first read A Pale View of Hills,” Rushdie said. “And he plays the guitar and writes songs too! Roll over Bob Dylan.”
Yet Ishiguro, who is currently “very deep” into writing his latest novel- which he is juggling alongside film, theatre and graphic novel projects- also expressed concern at the distracting burden of celebrity that the Nobel Prize might bring and impact on his writing.
Ishiguro said: “I’m hoping it doesn’t mark some kind of end. I’ve had to battle a lot of my writing life between the demands to be a public celebrity author and finding the time and space to do the real work, so I’m hoping the work itself just continues and is no different to where it was yesterday.
“I just hope I don’t get lazy or complacent, I hope my work won’t change. And I hope that younger readers aren’t put off by the Nobel. I have GCSE people reading my books and I’m very proud to have that younger audience.
Born in Japan, Ishiguro’s family moved to the UK when he was five. He studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, going on to publish his first novel, A Pale View of the Hills, in 1982. He has been a full time writer ever since. According to the Academy, the themes of “memory, time and self-delusion” weave through his work, particularly in The Remains of the Day, which won Ishiguro the Booker prize in 1989 and was adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins as the “duty-obsessed” butler Stevens.
Addressing Ishiguro’s Nobel win, the former poet laureate Andrew Motion, said: “Ishiguro’s imaginative world has the great virtue and value of being simultaneously highly individual and deeply familiar – a world of puzzlement, isolation, watchfulness, threat and wonder”.
“How does he do it?” asked Motion. “Among other means, by resting his stories on founding principles which combine a very fastidious kind of reserve with equally vivid indications of emotional intensity. It’s a remarkable and fascinating combination, and wonderful to see it recognised by the Nobel prize-givers.”“How does he do it?” asked Motion. “Among other means, by resting his stories on founding principles which combine a very fastidious kind of reserve with equally vivid indications of emotional intensity. It’s a remarkable and fascinating combination, and wonderful to see it recognised by the Nobel prize-givers.”
Permanent secretary of the academy Sara Danius spoke to Ishiguro about his win around an hour after the announcement: “He was very charming, nice and well-versed, of course. He said he felt very grateful and honoured, and that this is the greatest award you can receive.” Will Self, meanwhile, reacted to Ishiguro’s win in characteristically lugubrious fashion.
She described Ishiguro’s writing as a mix of the works of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, “but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix, and then you stir, but not too much, and then you have his writings. “He’s a good writer,” Self said, “and from what I’ve witnessed a lovely man, but the singularity of his vision is ill-served by such crushing laurels, while I doubt the award will do little to reestablish the former centrality of the novel to our culture.”
“He’s a writer of great integrity. He doesn’t look to the side, he’s developed an aesthetic universe all his own,” she said. Danius named her favourite of Ishiguro’s novels as The Buried Giant, but called The Remains of the Day “a true masterpiece [which] starts as a PG Wodehouse novel and ends as something Kafkaesque”. The Nobel prize for literature comes with winnings of 9m Swedish krona (£832,000). Permanent secretary of the academy Sara Danius spoke to Ishiguro about his win around an hour after the announcement. It was a marked change to previous winners such as Bob Dylan who took weeks to acknowledge the accolade, and Doris Lessing, who famously responded “oh Christ” when the news was broken to her by reporters. “He was very charming, nice and well-versed, of course. He said he felt very grateful and honoured, and that this is the greatest award you can receive,” said Danius.
“He is someone who is very interested in understanding the past, but he is not a Proustian writer, he is not out to redeem the past, he is exploring what you have to forget in order to survive in the first place as an individual or as a society,” she said, adding – in the wake of last year’s uproar – that she hoped the choice would “make the world happy”.“He is someone who is very interested in understanding the past, but he is not a Proustian writer, he is not out to redeem the past, he is exploring what you have to forget in order to survive in the first place as an individual or as a society,” she said, adding – in the wake of last year’s uproar – that she hoped the choice would “make the world happy”.
“That’s not for me to judge. We’ve just chosen what we think is an absolutely brilliant novelist,” she said.“That’s not for me to judge. We’ve just chosen what we think is an absolutely brilliant novelist,” she said.
Ishiguro’s publisher at Faber & Faber, Stephen Page, said the win was “absolutely extraordinary news”.
“He’s just an absolutely singular writer” said Page, who received news of Ishiguro’s win while waiting for a flight at Dublin airport. “He has an emotional force as well as an intellectual curiosity, that always finds enormous numbers of readers. His work is challenging at times, and stretching, but because of that emotional force, it so often resonates with readers. He’s a literary writer who is very widely read around the world.”
Born in Japan, Ishiguro’s family moved to the UK when he was five. He studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, going on to publish his first novel, A Pale View of the Hills, in 1982. He has been a full time writer ever since. According to the Academy, the themes of “memory, time and self-delusion” weave through his work, particularly in The Remains of the Day, which won Ishiguro the Booker prize in 1989 and was adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins as the “duty-obsessed” butler Stevens.
His more recent novels have taken a turn for the fantastical: Never Let Me Go is set in a dystopic version of England, while The Buried Giant, published two years ago, sees an elderly couple on a road trip through a strange and otherworldly English landscape. “This novel explores, in a moving manner, how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality,” said the Swedish Academy. Apart from his eight books, which include the short story collection Nocturnes, Ishiguro has written scripts for film and television, and revealed on Thursday that he was also working on a graphic novel.
“I’m always working on a novel, but I’m hoping to collaborate on comics - not superheroes,” he said. “But I’m in discussions with people to work on a graphic novel, which excites me because it’s new for me and it reunited me with my childhood, reading manga.”
Awarded since 1901, the 9m Swedish krona (£832,000) Nobel prize is for the writing of an author who, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s bequest, “shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Ishiguro becomes the 114th winner, following in the footsteps of writers including Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Mo Yan and Pablo Neruda.
The award is judged by the secretive members of the Swedish Academy, who last year plumped for the American musician Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. He proved an elusive winner and was described as “impolite and arrogant” by academy member Per Wastberg after initially failing to acknowledge the honour.
Some members of the literary community were also less than impressed: “This feels like the lamest Nobel win since they gave it to Obama for not being Bush,” said Hari Kunzru at the time. The choice of a writer who has won awards including the Man Booker prize should pour oil on at least some of the troubled waters ruffled by Dylan’s win, though Will Self reacted to Ishiguro’s win in characteristically lugubrious fashion.
“He’s a good writer,” Self said, “and from what I’ve witnessed a lovely man, but the singularity of his vision is ill-served by such crushing laurels, while I doubt the award will do little to reestablish the former centrality of the novel to our culture.”