New Delhi: Last week the British author behind books including Man Booker winner ‘The Remains of the Day’ was selected for this year’s Nobel award for literature.
The Nobel Prize for literature comes with a handsome prize money of 9m Swedish krona (£832,000). The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.
Despite being among those tipped for the prize, whose previous winners include Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing and Pablo Neruda; Ishiguro told a publication that he had been completely unprepared for the announcement and had even doubted at first if it was true.
In giving the honour the committee noted that the author had crafted “novels of great emotional force” that “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Ishiguro’s fiction has provoked strong reactions, from praise to dismay, throughout his long career.
The award of the $1.1 million prize marks a return to a more mainstream interpretation of literature after it went to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan last year.
Ishiguro takes his place beside Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Doris Lessing and Ernest Hemingway as winner of the world’s most prestigious literary award.
Who is Kazuo Ishiguro? Here’s all you need to know about the British novelist:
Kazuo Ishiguro, 62, is best known for his novels “The Remains of the Day,” about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go,” a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school.
Ishiguro began to gain attention in the 1980s for works such as “A Pale View of the Hills” and won global fame for “The Remains of the Day,” a story of a fastidious and repressed butler in postwar Britain. The movie version starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Ishiguro was praised by the Swedish Academy for novels which “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” and were driven by a “great emotional force”.
Japan-born Ishiguro also won the Man Booker Prize for the 1989 novel that was made into an Oscar-nominated movie.
Ishiguro, is currently “very deep” into writing his latest novel, which he is juggling alongside film, theatre and graphic novel projects etc. The works of the 62-year-old author, who has written eight books, have been translated into more than 40 languages and been best-sellers around the world.
Early life:
Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, Ishiguro moved to Britain with his family when he was five years old, only returning to visit Japan as an adult.
He read English and philosophy at the University of Kent after a gap year that included working as a grouse beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral
He studied an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where his tutors were Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter
The budding novelist studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, becoming a full-time writer after publishing his first novel A Pale View of the Hills in 1982.
Career:
Kazuo Ishiguro's early career set a modern benchmark for precocious literary success.
In 1982 he won the Winifred Holtby award for the best expression of a sense of place, for his debut novel A Pale View of Hills.
In 1983, he was included in the seminal Granta best of young British writers list, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain and Pat Barker.
Three years later his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, picked up the Whitbread book of the year and
In 1989 his third, The Remains of the Day, won the Booker.
At 34, Ishiguro's place in the literary firmament was already secure and he felt as if he'd only just begun.
His Style:
Kazuo Ishiguro grew up in Guildford wrote songs and became a social worker before studying creative writing. Although, he never succeeded in the music business, but writing songs helped shape the idiosyncratic, elliptical prose style that made him one of the most acclaimed and influential British writers of his generation.
Permanent secretary of the academy Sara Danius described the novelist’s work as a mix of “Jane Austen and Franz Kafka”.
The Nobel committee praised his latest book The Buried Giant, which was released in 2015, for exploring "how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality".
His books at a glance:
His first novel A Pale View of Hills was about a Japanese woman living in England trying to come to terms with her daughter's death
He followed that with An Artist of the Floating World in 1986
The Remains of the Day tells the story of a butler in a stately home whose boss was a Nazi sympathiser
His only book of the 1990s was The Unconsoled, which was followed by When We Were Orphans in 2000
2005's Never Let Me Go followed a group of students at a boarding school living in a dystopian future. It was turned into a film starring Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan five years later
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall was a collection of stories published in 2009
His most recent novel was The Buried Giant in 2015
Ishiguro has also written a number of screenplays, including The White Countessand The Saddest Music in the World, as well as other short stories
The 2017 Nobel Season:
Given the lifelong prestige of becoming a Nobel laureate, the prize is a significant boost to any researcher's career. The acclaim can legitimise a life's work, and yield international notoriety in a field where funding is highly competitive.
The Nobel Prize in Physics:
Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves"
They received the prize for the discovery of gravitational waves released in the world by violent events in the universe such as the mergers of black holes. Weiss, professor emeritus of physics at MIT, along with Thorne and Barish, California Institute of Technology physicists, pioneered LIGO, or the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, the scientific project that made gravitational wave detection possible.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry:
Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"
The technique makes it possible to see biomolecules in 3D after rapidly freezing them around- 150 degree celcius, preserving their natural shape. It has helped scientists view biomolecule structure like that of Zika virus.
Jacques Dubochet is a retired biophysicist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joachim Frank, a professor at Columbia University in New York, and Richard Henderson is a scientist at the British Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine:
Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm"
The award celebrates the study of the tiny biological clocks in every living thing. The three American scientists “were able to peek inside our biological clock and elucidate its inner workings,” the Nobel Prize Committee said. “Their discoveries explain how plants, animals, and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth's revolutions.”
The Nobel Peace Prize:
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons."
The group formed by Geneva-based coalition of disarmament activists is behind the first treaty to prohibit nuclear arms. Headquartered in Geneva, it comprises 468 NGOs across 101 countries.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel:
The 2017 Prize in Economic Sciences has not been awarded yet. It will be announced on Monday 9 October, 11:45 a.m. at the earliest.
References:
https://www.theguardian.com
http://www.bbc.com
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com
http://www.euronews.com