The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro.
News of Ishiguro’s recognition came out early Thursday. The Japanese-born, British writer was perhaps best known for his work as a novelist, including receiving four Man Booker Prize nominations for his 1980s novel The Remains of the Day.
The novel is told from the first person, portraying butler Stevens, who writes a diary in which the action progresses through to the present. It focuses on his relationship with a former colleague.
His other popular works include
Never Let Me Go, which was named by Time magazine as the best novel of 2005 and named one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” said Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of The Swedish Academy.
Some of the popular themes you can find in Ishiguro’s work include mortality, the ephemeral nature of time and the flaws in memory as emotion sometimes affect the way we interpret facts.
Ishiguro said he was shocked by the recognition as he wasn’t expecting to be granted the highest award in literature. He discovered literature through Sherlock Holmes when he was nine or 10 years old, prompting him to start acting like Holmes and Watson.
