Kazuo Ishiguro, who won this year's Nobel Prize In Literature, answers questions from the media in the garden of his London home. John Stillwell/Press Association. All rights reserved.“In an age of false news I thought it must be a mistake.” The familiar wry modesty and measured tones of Kazuo Ishiguro’s reaction to news of his Nobel literature award were a reminder (contrary to D.H. Lawrence’s famous injunction) that the teller as well as the tale can invite trust. Over the years of growing acclaim since his short stories and then novels began appearing in the early 1980s, the now sixty-two-year-old Ishiguro’s public persona — equable and lucid in interviews, a convivial presence in a hectic literary world — has been constant.
His provenance, as the Nagasaki-born younger son of Japanese parents who arrived in Guildford, southwest of London, when he was five, gave him initial distinction in that world, as well as providing the themes of his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). It seemed to matter at a time when the publishing industry was learning to market authors, and authors to become personalities, their points of social and cultural differentiation now a potential new lure.
Like Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain, Ishiguro enrolled as a student at the University of East Anglia’s soon-to-be-famous creative writing course, founded by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. His sparring over technique with Angela Carter bled into lasting comradeship. He featured in the Book Marketing Council’s list of best young British novelists in 1983. A flashy new generation of writers that included Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie solicited reams of copy about their biographies, politics, romances, feuds and — these were the early years of Thatcherism, after all — publishers’ advances.
