Kazuo Ishiguro
Biography of Kazuo Ishiguro :
Kazuo Ishiguro (born 8 November, 1954) is a Japanese–English novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor\'s degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Master\'s from the University of East Anglia\'s creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.
Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, including winning the 1989 prize for his novel
The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". His novel
Never Let Me Go has been adapted to film.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. In 1960 his family, including his two sisters, moved to Guildford, Surrey so that his father could work on oil development in the North Sea. He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school he took a \'gap year\' and travelled through America and Canada, while writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies.
In 1974 he began studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and he graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in English and Philosophy. After spending a year writing fiction, he resumed his studies at the University of East Anglia where he gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982. He co-wrote four of the songs on jazz singer Stacey Kent\'s 2009 Breakfast On the Morning Tram album. He also wrote the liner notes to Kent\'s 2003 album, In Love Again.
A number of his novels are set in the past. His most recent, Never Let Me Go, has science fiction qualities and a futuristic tone; however, it is set in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus takes place in a very similar yet alternate world. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, takes place in an unnamed Central European city. The Remains of the Day is set in the large country house of an English lord in the period surrounding World War II.
The novels are written in the first-person narrative style and the narrators often exhibit human failings. Ishiguro\'s technique is to allow these characters to reveal their flaws implicitly during the narrative. The author thus creates a sense of pathos by allowing the reader to see the narrator\'s flaws while being drawn to sympathize with the narrator as well. This pathos is often derived from the narrator\'s actions, or, more often, inaction. In The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens fails to act on his romantic feelings toward housekeeper Miss Kenton because he cannot reconcile his sense of service with his personal life.
Ishiguro\'s novels often end without any sense of resolution. The issues his characters confront are buried in the past and remain unresolved. Thus Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation. His characters accept their past and who they have become, typically discovering that this realization brings comfort and an ending to mental anguish. This can be seen as a literary reflection on the Japanese idea of mono no aware.
Personal life
Ishiguro, who has been married since 1986, met his wife while working as a residential resettlement worker for the West London Cyrenians homelessness charity in Notting Hill. Lorna MacDougall, a social worker, also worked for the charity. They live in London with their daughter Naomi.
Awards
He was featured in the first two Granta Best of Young British Novelists: in 1983 and in 1993. He won the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World. He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third novel, The Remains of the Day. An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans and his most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, were all short-listed for the Booker Prize. A leaked account of a judging committee\'s meeting revealed that the committee found itself deciding between Never Let Me Go and John Banville\'s The Sea before awarding the prize to the latter.
He was appointed OBE for services to literature in 1995, and was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1998. On Time magazine\'s 2005 list of the 100 greatest English language novels published since the magazine formed in 1923, Never Let Me Go was the most recent novel. In 2008, The Times named Ishiguro among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1989.