Novel set in LONDON and PARIS
Little known facts about best-selling author Kazuo Ishiguro
23rd December 2019
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan on 8th November, 1954. His father Shizuo was an oceanographer and the family, including 5 year-old Kazuo’s two sisters, moved to Guildford in Surrey when Shizuo was invited to take part in a research project at the National Institute of Oceanography in Southampton.
Kazuo did not return to Japan until 1989, by which time he had attended Woking County Grammar School in Surrey, travelled around the USA and Canada on a gap year, studied English and Philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury and gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, led by Malcom Bradbury and Angela Carter.
His stellar writing career was well underway, with the thesis for UEA becoming his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982.
Kazuo became a British citizen in 1983, but set his first two novels in Japan, saying: ‘I’m not entirely like English people because I’ve been brought up by Japanese parents in a Japanese-speaking home. I think differently, my perspectives are slightly different.’
An Artist of the Floating World was published in 1986 and won the Whitbread Prize that year. The novel is set in an unnamed Japanese city during the period of reconstruction following Japan’s surrender in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in World War II.
The Remains of the Day, published in 1989, cemented Kazuo’s literary prominence, winning the Booker Prize and being adapted a few years later into a successful film, starring Anthony Hopkins as Stevens the butler.
Similarly. Never Let me Go was published in 2005, short-listed for the Booker Prize, named on Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest English language novels since the magazine’s formation in 1923, and adapted for the silver screen in 2010.
Kazuo was awarded an OBE in 1995 and won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2017. He lives in London with his wife Lorna and daughter Naomi. He loves movies and is a huge admirer of Bob Dylan, a fellow Nobel Prize winner.
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