Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize-winning Japanese-born British writer best known for his emotional depictions of human connection.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954. When Ishiguro was five, his father, an oceanographer, was invited to work at the British National Institute of Oceanography, initially on a short term basis. His stint there would later morph into a permanent position, leading Ishiguro to be raised almost entirely in Guildford, Surrey. As a teenager, he developed an interest in rock music, particularly the lyricism of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and considered becoming a songwriter. He attended University of Kent and graduated in 1978. After his graduation, Ishiguro started at a charity organization in London working with the homeless population. He began writing in his spare time and applied for and was accepted to a creative writing masters program at the University of East Anglia. It was here that Ishiguro first began writing of his homeland, Japan, saying, “my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.” Three of his short stories were accepted for publication in the 1981 anthology Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers.
Having decided on a career as a writer and abandoning his musical aspirations, Ishiguro set to work and published his first novel A Pale View of Hills in 1982. A melancholic tale about a mother mourning the loss of her daughter to suicide in post-war Japan, its commercial and critical success allowed Ishiguro to quit his job at the charity organization (which he had returned to upon completion of his masters degree) and focus on writing full time. His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, was published in 1986 and shortlisted for the Booker prize, solidifying Ishiguro as a premier young writer in Great Britain. He would later win the Booker Prize with his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day, a tale about an emotionally distant butler. It was adapted into a film in 1993 and received eight Oscar nominations. Ishiguro followed up his enormous success with the rather divisive novel The Unconsoled in 1995. Undeterred by the mixed reviews, he continued writing and released several novels over the next few years, including When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005). Never Let Me Go explores the relationships between young teenagers and what it means to truly be human and have a soul; it was adapted into a successful film in 2010.
In 2017, Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “novels of great emotional force” which “uncover the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” In addition to his novels, Ishiguro has written several screenplays, short stories, and lyrics for songs. He currently resides in London.