British author Kazuo Ishiguro said that he was taken completely by surprise when the news of his winning the Nobel Prize was broken to him and even wondered whether it was fake news. The author of novels including ‘The Remains of the Day’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’ won the 2017 Nobel prize in literature.  

The Swedish Academy for novels praised Ishiguro’s works which “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” and were driven by a “great emotional force”.

The news of winning the prestigious prize whose previous winners include Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing and Pablo Neruda came as a pleasant surprise for  Ishiguro who had been sitting at his kitchen table at home in Golders Green in London about to have brunch, when he got the call from his agent.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in Japan but moved to the UK when he was five. He studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, A Pale View of the Hills was published in 1982. He has been a full-time writer ever since.

 According to the Academy, the themes of “memory, time and self-delusion” weave through his work, particularly in The Remains of the Day, which won Ishiguro the Booker prize in 1989 and was adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins as the “duty-obsessed” butler Stevens.