Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist, born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954. He grew up in England and has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life, writing in English. His novels are known for quiet, precise prose and for narrators who are unreliable, not through lying but because they avoid or soften painful truths about their own lives.

His books move across very different settings, from postwar Japan and an English country house to a boarding school with a strange purpose, a mythic Britain and a near future shared with artificial companions. Beneath these changes run steady concerns: memory, regret, duty, self-deception and the ways people live with what they cannot change. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Readers value him for stories that seem calm on the surface and then reveal great emotional depth.