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How to pronounce Kazuo Ishiguro: KAH-zoo-oh ish-ih-GUHR-oh
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on November, 8 1954. He came to Britain in 1960 when his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey.
Afterwards he worked as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral before enrolling at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he read English and Philosophy. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating, worked as a residential social worker in London. He studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where he met Angela Carter, who became an early mentor. He has been writing full-time since 1982. In 1983, shortly after the publication of his first novel, Ishiguro was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers'. He was also included in the same promotion when it was repeated in 1993.
In 1981 three of his short stories were published in Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), narrated by a Japanese widow living in England, draws on the destruction and rehabilitation of Nagasaki. It was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. It was followed by An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which explores Japanese national attitudes to the Second World War through the story of former artist Masuji Ono, haunted by his military past. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
Ishiguro's third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), is set in post-war England, and tells the story of an elderly English butler confronting disillusionment as he recalls a life spent in service. It was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction and was subsequently made into an award-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. His next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), a formally inventive narrative in which a concert pianist struggles to fulfil a schedule of rehearsals and performances in an unnamed European city, was awarded the Cheltenham Prize in 1995.
Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), is set in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century and is narrated by a private detective investigating his parents' disappearance in the city some 20 years earlier. It was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize for Fiction. In 2017, Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He has also written two original screenplays for Channel 4 Television, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason, and The Gourmet. He was awarded the OBE in 1995 for services to literature and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.
His latest novel is Klara and the Sun (2021).
Ishiguro lives in London with his wife and daughter.
This bio was last updated on 02/12/2021. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
What was your starting point for Never Let Me Go?
Over the last fifteen years I kept writing pieces of a story about an odd
group of "students" in the English countryside. I was never sure who these
people were. I just knew they lived in wrecked farmhouses, and though they did a
few typically student-like things—argued over books, worked on the occasional
essay, fell in and out of love—there was no college campus or teacher anywhere
in sight. I knew too that some strange fate hung over these young people, but I
didn't know what. In my study at home, I have a lot of these short pieces, some
going back as far as the early '90s. I'd wanted to write a novel about my
students, but I'd never got any further; I'd always ended up writing some other
quite different novel. Then around four years ago I heard a discussion on the
radio about advances in biotechnology. I usually tune out when scientific
discussions come on, but this time I listened, and the framework around these
students of mine finally fell in place. I could see a way of writing a story
that was simple, but very fundamental, about the sadness of the human condition.
This novel is set in a ...
Megan Angelo grew up in Quakertown, Pennsylvania and graduated from Villanova University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Glamour and Elle, among other publications. She lives in ... (more)
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Tash Aw is the author of four novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won the Whitbread and ... (more)
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When We Were Orphans
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