Praised for his "novels of great emotional force," English author Kazuo Ishiguro was named the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, The Guardian reported Thursday.
Born in Japan, Ishiguro’s family moved to the United Kingdom when he was 5, The Guardian reported. His first novel, “A Pale View of the Hills,” was published in 1982.
The Swedish Academy, which conducts the judging, said the themes of “memory, time and self-delusion” were major components of Ishiguro’s work, particularly in his 1989 work, “The Remains of the Day.” That novel won the Booker Prize in 1989 and was adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins as the “duty-obsessed” butler Stevens.
Permanent secretary of the academy Sara Danius 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 writer of great integrity. He doesn’t look to the side, he’s developed an aesthetic universe all his own,” she told The Guardian. “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.”
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