Career
Kazuo Ishiguro has been writing full-time since 1982. In 1983, soon after having published his first novel, he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers'. He was on the list again when it was repeated in 1993.
In 1981 three of his short stories were included 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 devastation and rehabilitation of Nagasaki. It was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Soon there followed An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which explores Japanese national attitudes to World War 2 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.
The events of Ishiguro's third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), take place in post-war England, and the author tells the story of an elderly English butler confronting disillusionment as he recalls a life spent in service, memories viewed against a backdrop of war and the rise of Fascism. 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.
Kazuo 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.
He has also written two original screenplays for Channel 4 Television, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason, broadcast in 1984, and The Gourmet, broadcast in 1986. 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 Never Let Me Go (2005) and he collaborated with George Toles and Guy Maddin on the screenplay for The Saddest Music in the World, a melodrama set in the 1930s, starring Isabella Rossellini. In 2009, his first short story collection, Noctures: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, was published, and shortlisted for the 2010 James Tait Back Memorial Prize (for fiction).