Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-British writer known for novels, screenplays, short stories, and music. He is widely regarded as one of the most celebrated living authors in English, with major awards including the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised him for novels of great emotional force that reveal the hidden depths beneath our false sense of connection to the world.

Early life and education

Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, Ishiguro moved to Britain at age five when his father, a physical oceanographer, took a research position at the National Institute of Oceanography. The family settled in Guildford, Surrey. He did not return to Japan until 1989, nearly thirty years later, as part of a short-term visitors' program. He became a British citizen in 1983.

His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, explore Japanese identity with a mournful tone. Ishiguro later said these Japanese settings were imaginary, built from a strong emotional image of a country he felt tied to but had not seen since childhood. He described growing up in a Japanese family in the UK as crucial to his writing, giving him a different perspective from many English peers. He has since moved into themes resembling science fiction and historical fiction, while continuing to focus on outsiders, the search for an unattainable truth, and the sense of recent history as a web in which people struggle in vain.

2021–present: Klara and the Sun and Living

He has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times, winning in 1989 for The Remains of the Day. The novel was adapted into a film in 1993.

Salman Rushdie called it Ishiguro’s masterpiece, noting that he turned away from Japanese settings and revealed a sensibility not rooted in any one place, but capable of travel and change. Time named Never Let Me Go the best novel of 2005 and one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the 2022 film Living.

Ishiguro attended Stoughton Primary School and Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. As a child, he sang solos as a choirboy. As a teenager, he listened to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan, learned guitar, and wrote songs, aiming to become a professional songwriter. He says his style as a novelist comes substantially from what he learned writing songs, including the intimate first-person quality of a singer performing to an audience and the need to approach meaning subtly, sometimes between the lines.

After finishing school in 1973, he took a gap year traveling through the United States and Canada, writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies. He also worked as a grouse beater at Balmoral Castle. He later reflected that he saw himself as a musician type but realized it wasn’t him—he was more like someone in corduroy jackets with elbow patches.

He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury, graduating in 1978. After a year writing fiction, he completed a Master of Arts in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, studying with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His thesis became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982.

1982–1994: Literary beginnings and breakthrough

Ishiguro has said he has little familiarity with Japanese writing and that his works bear little resemblance to Japanese fiction. An Artist of the Floating World is set in an unnamed Japanese city during the Allied Occupation after World War II. The narrator must come to terms with his role in the war, criticized by the younger generation for Japan’s misguided foreign policy, and is forced to reevaluate his beliefs.

Ishiguro explained he is drawn to pre-war and postwar settings because he is interested in values and ideals being tested, and people facing the notion that their ideals were not what they thought. In a 1989 interview, he said he is not entirely like English people because he was brought up by Japanese parents in a Japanese-speaking home, and his parents felt responsible for keeping him in touch with Japanese values. He thinks differently and his perspectives are slightly different.