The 2017 Nobel Literature Prize has been awarded to novelist Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro (62) OBE FRSA FRSL, the Nagasaki born British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer, who explores “what you have to forget to survive”, has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Literature prize, after the controversy last year when it honoured Bob Dylan, the US singer-songwriter, who initially declined to acknowledge the honour  and did not turn up to award ceremony, but finally accepted the prize in a private ceremony in April.

The academy praised Ishiguro, known for his 1989 Booker Prize-winning book, “The Remains of the Day”, and according to Sara Danius, secretary of the Nobel Academy, “If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro. He is someone who is very interested in understanding the past exploring what you have to forget in order survive in the first place as in individual or as a society ”.

Salman Rushdie, Author of Midnight’s children, said “ and he plays the guitar and write songs too! Roll over Bob Dylan.”

Ishiguro came to England at the age of five, becoming a British citizen in 1983. As a musician, he also studied creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia.

His first novels were about the shock and impact of the second world war on individuals who were innocent but were profoundly affected by it. His first novel,  A Pale View of Hills was set in England and war-devastated Nagasaki.

In “The Remains of the day”, Stevens a stifled English butler in a stately home whose boss was a Nazi sympathiser and his affair with Miss Kenton, housekeeper, which was made into a film starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. His other novels are:  A Pale View of Hills, was about a Japanese woman living in England trying to come to terms with her daughter’s death, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Unconsoled (1995), Never Let Me Go (2005) about a group of students at a boarding school living in a dystopian future which was also turned into a film starring Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan, Nocturnes: five stories of Music and Nightfall (2009) and When We Were Orphans (2000), The Buried Giant (2015).