A Pale View of Hills (1982)
Debut novel: Etsuko, a Japanese woman in England, recalls postwar Nagasaki after her daughter's suicide
Literature · Novelists
Kazuo Ishiguro
born 1954 · Japanese-born British
Literary fiction; unreliable first-person narration
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki and moved to England aged five. His restrained, first-person novels of memory, self-deception and loss include the Booker-winning The Remains of the Day and the dystopian Never Let Me Go, and he won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. His first novel since Klara and the Sun, Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger, is due in March 2027.
How to spot them
- ▸Stevens the butler at Darlington Hall (The Remains of the Day)
- ▸Kathy H., Hailsham school and cloned 'donors' (Never Let Me Go)
- ▸Klara, an 'Artificial Friend' who reveres the Sun
- ▸Born in Nagasaki; Nobel 2017 for uncovering 'the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world'
- ▸Studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury
Key works
An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
Ageing painter Masuji Ono confronts his work for Japanese imperialism; won the Whitbread Book of the Year
The Remains of the Day (1989)
Booker winner: butler Stevens reflects on serving the Nazi-appeasing Lord Darlington; filmed with Anthony Hopkins
The Unconsoled (1995)
Dreamlike novel of a pianist, Ryder, arriving in an unnamed central European city
When We Were Orphans (2000)
Detective Christopher Banks returns to Shanghai to solve his parents' disappearance
Never Let Me Go (2005)
Kathy H. recalls Hailsham, a school for clones raised to donate their organs
The Buried Giant (2015)
An elderly Briton couple journey through a post-Arthurian England shrouded by a forgetful mist
Klara and the Sun (2021)
Narrated by Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend bought as a companion for a sick girl
Key ideas
- Unreliable narrators who gradually reveal what they have avoided confronting
- Memory, dignity, duty and the wasted life
- Uses genre settings (detective story, science fiction, Arthurian fantasy) for quiet emotional drama
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954; his family moved to Guildford, Surrey, in 1960
- •Took an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia
- •Wanted to be a singer-songwriter and has written lyrics for the jazz singer Stacey Kent
- •Won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017
- •Knighted in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to literature
- •Oscar-nominated for adapting the screenplay of the film Living (2022), based on Kurosawa's Ikiru
- •His next novel, Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger, a spy story set in 1938 London, was announced in June 2026 for March 2027
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Sources
- Nobel Prize Outreach — Kazuo Ishiguro – Facts
- Literary Hub — Kazuo Ishiguro's next novel, out next year, will be a 1930s spy caper