Kazuo Ishiguro [ United Kingdom ]

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954. At the age of five his family moved to England, where his father embarked on research at the National Institute of Oceanography. What was initially a short-term arrangement soon became a permanent residence. After attending school in Surrey he worked temporarily as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother. Whilst aspiring to become a rock star he was employed as a social worker, caring for homeless people in Scotland, before reading English and Philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He then went on to study Creative Writing under Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia. Ishiguro’s first novel, »A Pale View of Hills«, soon followed in 1982, and won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. The publication of five subsequent novels and four screenplays for television and cinema further established his status as a leading exponent of British literature. Central to his works are individuals who have become so deeply submerged in their own worlds, that they ignore the very forces that drive them. They delve nostalgically into their inner thoughts and memories, an act which eventually brings them to realise, to some extent, their powerlessness against their own fate. »An Artist of the Floating World« (1986), a novel about a painter in the service of the Japanese imperial regime, received the Whitbread Book of the Year award. The Booker Prize-winning »The Remains of the Day« (1989) follows an overzealous butler through the Second World War, whose complete dedication to service results in a failure to lead his own life. This world bestseller was made into an award-winning picture starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Following the kafkaesque »The Unconsoled« (1995) – awarded with the Cheltenham Prize – came »When We Were Orphans« in 2000. This unorthodox detective story depicts a lonely and somewhat old-fashioned private investigator who travels to Shanghai in the nineteen thirties to explain the disappearance of his parents and, in doing so, reveals his delusional self-perception. His latest novel, »Never Let Me Go« (2005), is a mild horror story set in a boarding school where the pupils are protected from a terrible secret, which as they grow older they will inevitably be confronted with. The film »The White Countess«, directed by James Ivory – of which Ishiguro wrote the original screenplay – will be released in November 2005. In 1995 Ishiguro received the Order of the British Empire for services to literature and in 1998 was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In addition, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Ishiguro lives in London with his wife and daughter.

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