Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese-born British novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. He is best known for “The Remains of the Day”, which won the Booker Prize in 1989, and “Never Let Me Go”.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki and moved to Guildford, Surrey, in 1960, when his father, an oceanographer, was invited to carry out research in Britain. As a teenager he hoped to become a songwriter. He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent, graduating in 1978, and took a master’s on the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia in 1980, where his tutors included Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His thesis became his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills” (1982). He became a British citizen in 1983.
“An Artist of the Floating World” (1986), set in a Japanese city during the Allied Occupation, has a narrator forced to face his part in the Second World War; it won the Whitbread Prize. “The Remains of the Day” is narrated by Stevens, a butler at an English country house, who takes a motoring holiday in 1956 and looks back on the 1920s and 1930s. The 1993 Merchant Ivory film starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
“The Unconsoled” (1995) and “When We Were Orphans” (2000) followed. “Never Let Me Go” (2005), set in an alternative England and following the students of a boarding school, was named the best novel of the year by Time magazine and filmed in 2010 with Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley. “The Buried Giant” (2015) follows an elderly couple through a post-Arthurian England where no one can hold on to long-term memories. “Klara and the Sun” (2021), narrated by an “Artificial Friend”, was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Ishiguro received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay for “Living” (2022). He has also written lyrics for the jazz singer Stacey Kent, sixteen of which were collected in “The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain” (2024). He was knighted in 2018 and appointed a Companion of Honour in 2024. A film of “A Pale View of Hills” premiered at Cannes in 2025. His ninth novel, “Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger”, a comic spy story set in 1930s England, is due in March 2027.
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| A Pale View of Hills | 1982 |
| An Artist of the Floating World | 1986 |
| The Remains of the Day | 1989 |
| The Unconsoled | 1995 |
| When We Were Orphans | 2000 |
| Never Let Me Go | 2005 |
| The Buried Giant | 2015 |
| Klara and the Sun | 2021 |
| Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger | 2027 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall | 2009 |
Publication Order of Lyrics Collections
| The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent | 2024 |
Photo: Frankie Fouganthin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).