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Kazuo Ishiguro

Novelist (b.1954)

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Japan, but moved to Britain in 1960. Ishiguro earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury and a master’s degree from the University of East Anglia. His writing often reflects a life in two worlds, Japan and England.

Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, about a widow in post-war Japan, received the Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. His second novel, An Artist in the Floating World, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. The story, set in Nagasaki following the atomic bomb attack in 1945, revolves around a protagonist who must come to terms with his part in World War II. His third and probably most acclaimed work, The Remains of the Day, is about an English butler who struggles to deal with his romantic feelings for a housekeeper versus his sense of service to employer. The novel was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction and became an award-winning movie by James Ivory in 1993.

Ishiguro effectively utilizes a first-person narrative style, and he is often praised for his eye for details in regard to the story’s setting in time and place. "Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation, whereby his characters accept their past and who they have become, and find comfort in that realization by a relief from mental anguish. This can be seen as a literary reflection on the Japanese idea of mono no aware. (Wikipedia)"

Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent works include The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), The Saddest Music in the World (2003, a screenplay), Never Let Me Go (2005), and The White Countess (2005, a screenplay). The author currently resides in London with his wife and daughter.

Sources:


Biography

Works & Criticism

  • Publisher's site: RandomHouse.com
  • Brian W. Shaffer, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro. University of South Carolina Press, 1998 (?).
  • Reviews of various Ishiguro novels. Page created by Bradley C. Shoop, Dept. of English, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

When We Were Orphans (2000)

The Unconsoled (1996)

Other

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