Kazuo Ishiguro

Born on 8 November 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, five years after the city was the target of the second atomic bomb, Kazuo Ishiguro moved to England in 1960 when his father, an oceanographer, took a research position with the National Institute of Oceanography in Surrey. The family expected to return to Japan within a year or two; they never did. Ishiguro grew up in Guildford, speaking Japanese at home and English everywhere else, and did not revisit Japan until 1989, by which time the country of his childhood had become largely a country of the imagination. He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent and then creative writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), set partly in postwar Nagasaki, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. An Artist of the Floating World (1986) explored Japanese identity through an aging painter’s unreliable recollections. Then came The Remains of the Day (1989), his masterpiece , the story of Stevens, an English butler whose lifetime of emotional suppression and deference to a Nazi-sympathizing employer is revealed through the most exquisitely restrained first-person narration in modern fiction. It won the Booker Prize and was adapted into a celebrated Merchant Ivory film starring Anthony Hopkins. The Unconsoled (1995), a dreamlike, Kafkaesque novel about a pianist in an unnamed European city, bewildered many readers and critics. Never Let Me Go (2005), a science-fiction novel about human clones raised for organ harvesting, was named by Time as the best novel of the year. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 for novels of “great emotional force” that “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” He was knighted in 2019.

In the summer of 1987, convinced he needed a drastic push, Ishiguro cleared his diary for four weeks. His wife Lorna took over the cooking and errands while he did nothing but write, nine in the morning until half past ten at night, six days a week. The month they called the Crash produced The Remains of the Day.