3360 ] English Literature
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro was
born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954. He came to Britain in 1960 when
his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was
educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey.
Afterwards he worked
as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral before enrolling at the
University of Kent, Canterbury, where he read English and Philosophy. He was
also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating
worked as a residential social worker in London.
He studied Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia, a member of the postgraduate course
run by Malcolm Bradbury, where he met Angela Carter, who became an early
mentor. He has been writing full-time since 1982. In 1983, shortly after the publication
of his first novel, Kazuo Ishiguro was nominated by Granta magazine as one of
the 20 ‘Best of Young British Writers’. He was also included in the same
promotion when it was repeated in 1993.
In 1981 three of his
short stories were published in Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. His
first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), narrated by a Japanese widow living
in England, draws on the destruction and rehabilitation of Nagasaki. It was
awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. It was followed by An Artist of the
Floating World (1986), which explores Japanese national attitudes to the Second
World War through the story of former artist Masuji Ono, haunted by his
military past. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was shortlisted
for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Ishiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the
Day (1989), is set in post-war England, and tells the story of an elderly
English butler confronting disillusionment as he recalls a life spent in
service, memories viewed against a backdrop of war and the rise of Fascism. It
was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction, and was subsequently made into an
award-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. His next novel,
The Unconsoled (1995), a formally inventive narrative in which a concert
pianist struggles to fulfil a schedule of rehearsals and performances in an
unnamed European city, was awarded the Cheltenham Prize in 1995. Kazuo
Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), is set in Shanghai in the
early part of the twentieth century, and is narrated by a private detective
investigating his parents’ disappearance in the city some 20 years earlier. It
was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize for
Fiction. His sixth novel is Never Let Me Go (2005) and he collaborated with
George Toles and Guy Maddin on the screenplay for The Saddest Music in the
World, a melodrama set in the 1930s, starring Isabella Rossellini. In 2009, his
first short story collection, Noctures: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall,
was published, and shortlisted for the 2010 James Tait Back Memorial Prize (for
fiction). His latest novel The Buried Giant was published in 2015.
He has also written
two original screenplays for Channel 4 Television, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason,
broadcast in 1984, and The Gourmet, broadcast in 1986. He was awarded the OBE
in 1995 for services to literature. He was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des
Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998. His work has been
translated into over 30 languages. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize for
Literature and in 2019, received a knighthood for services to literature.
Kazuo Ishiguro lives in London with his wife and daughter.
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