Kazuo Ishiguro Biography

Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born English novelist who shot to international fame with his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day (1989).

Originally from Nagasaki, Ishiguro’s father was an oceanographer who went to England in 1960 and stayed there.

Ishiguro studied English and Philosophy at the University of Kent, with time off to work and to travel to the United States in the early 1970s. He earned his degree in 1978, then graduated from a Master’s program for creative writing in 1980.

His first novel, A Pale View of the Hills, was published in 1982 to positive reviews, and his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) was nominated for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Award as book of the year.

With The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro knocked one out of the park. The story of a reserved English butler, it exemplified Ishiguro’s ability to capture loss and regret with understated prose and sold more than a million copies. The 1993 film version starred Anthony Hopkins and earned 8 Oscar nominations, including best picture. Ishiguro’s other novels include The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005) and The Buried Giant (2015).

Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 20017.