English author and novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, has been named winner of the 2017 Nobel prize in literature dashing the hopes of many Africans who had ex
English author and novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, has been named winner of the 2017 Nobel prize in literature dashing the hopes of many Africans who had expected Ngugi Wa Thiongo would get it, the BBC reports that the author of the novels titled ‘The Remains of the Day’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’, was praised by the Swedish Academy as a writer who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.
With writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Ngugi and Haruki Murakami leading the odds at the bookmakers, Ishiguro was a surprise choice. The 62-year-old writer who has written eight books that have been translated into over 40 languages said the award was ‘flabbergasting flattering’. He said he hoped the Nobel Prize would be a force for good.
He said, “The world is in a very uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel prizes would be a force for something positive in the world as it is at the moment. I’ll be deeply moved if I could in some way be part of some sort of climate this year in contributing to some sort of positive atmosphere at a very uncertain time.”
Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, he moved to England with his family when his father was offered a post as an oceanographer in Surrey. He read English and philosophy at the University of Kent after a year’s gap that included working as a grouse beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral.
He has an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where his tutors were Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His thesis became his critically acclaimed first novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982. He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s works, which includes scripts for film and television, looks at themes of memory, time and self-delusion.The Nobel committee praised his latest book The Buried Giant, which was released in 2015, for exploring “how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality”.
