Kazuo Ishiguro: Winner, Nobel Prize In Literature 2017

The Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 2017 was announced today. It was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro!!! This is a very deserving award.

In the words of the Academy, the award was given to Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work rather than a single title. – NewYork Times

Kazuo was born on the 8th day of November 1954, in Nagasaki, Japan. He has lived in England since he was five. He graduated from the University of Kent with a bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophy in 1978 and gained his Master’s from the University of East Anglia’s creative writing course in 1980.

He is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, and has received four Man Booker Prize nominations, and winning the 1989 award for his novel The Remains of the Day. His 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time magazine as the best novel of 2005 and included the novel in its 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. His seventh novel, The Buried Giant, was published in 2015.

According to the NewYork Times;

“In a career that spans some 35 years, Mr. Ishiguro has gained wide recognition for his idiosyncratic, emotionally restrained prose style. His novels are often narrated in the first person, by unreliable narrators who are in denial about truths that are gradually revealed to the reader. The resonance in his novels often comes from the rich subtext — the things left unsaid, and gaps between the narrator’s perception and reality.”

In an interview with The Times two years ago, Mr. Ishiguro said that he had discovered literature as a young boy when he came upon Sherlock Holmes stories in the local library. “I was around 9 or 10, and I not only read obsessively about Holmes and Watson, I started to behave like them. I’d go to school and say things like: ‘Pray, be seated’ or ‘That is most singular.’ People at the time just put this down to my being Japanese,” he said, adding that he was attracted to the world of Conan Doyle because it was “so very cozy.”

“Of the 113 laureates honoured since the prize was first awarded to France’s Sully Prudhomme in 1901, only 14 are women. But the Academy insists it doesn’t take gender into consideration, nor nationality, language or genre for that matter.”

Watch the Announcement of Nobel Prize For Literature in 2017 Here!

Three of his books have since been adapted into movies;

1) The Remains Of The Day, Directed by James Ivory in 1993

2) The White Countess, Directed by James Ivory in 2005

3) Never Let Me Go, Directed by Mark Romanek in 2010

FUN FACTS!!!

110 Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded 1901-2017.

14 women have been awarded the Literature Prize so far.

4 Literature Prizes have been divided between two persons.

41 years was the age of the youngest Literature Laureate ever, Rudyard Kipling, best known for The Jungle Book.

88 years was the age of the oldest Literature Laureate ever, Doris Lessing, when she was awarded the Prize in 2007.

65 is the average age of the Nobel Laureates in Literature the year they were awarded the prize.

The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.