The 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to British author of Japanese origin Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his literary work “The Remains of the Day”.
“It’s a magnificent honor, mainly because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived,” the 62-year-old author, who was born in Nagasaki but moved with his family to Britain when he was five, said Thursday.
The author, who will now receive the 9-million-kronor ($1.1 million) prize, said that humans were living in a “very uncertain time” and he hoped his work would be “contributing to some sort of positive atmosphere at a very uncertain time.”
“The world is in a very uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel prizes would be a force for something positive in the world,” he said.
His novels include: 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), among other literary works.
He is best known for “The Remains of the Day” due to a 1993 film adaptation of the book, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson which was nominated for 8 Oscars.
The novel depicts a British head butler at a grand house looking back on a life in service to the aristocracy. The duty-bound head butler’s world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested with the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in the pre-WWII landscape of the novel. The possibility of romance is repressed for duty, and his master’s cultivation of links with Nazi Germans challenges his carefully maintained career of servitude.
The Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, said that Ishiguro’s books were works of emotional force that uncover “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
Last year’s literature prize went to American songwriter Bob Dylan.
