British novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. Following the news, his publisher, Knopf, announced going back to press for a total of 200,000 new copies of some of his best-known works and other titles.
In its citation for the prize, the Swedish Academy commended Ishiguro as an author "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." On Twitter, it added: "the themes 2017 Literature Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro is most associated with are: memory, time, and self-delusion."
Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, but has lived in England since his family moved to the country in 1960, is best known for his novels—particularly The Remains of the Day (Knopf, 1989), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in 1993. He has written eight books, as well as a handful of songs for jazz singer Stacey Kent and screenplays for both film and television.
The author's most recent novel was 2015's The Buried Giant, which is set in Arthurian England that "explores," the Academy tweeted following the announcement, "how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality." In 2005, his novel Never Let Me Go (Knopf) "introduced," the Academy also tweeted, "a cold undercurrent of science fiction into his work."
According to Knopf’s Paul Bogaards, the publisher will reprint 75,000 copies of Never Let Me Go, 50,000 copies of RThe Remains of the Day, and 25,000 copies of The Buried Giant. Other works by Ishiguro include A Pale View of Hills (Faber and Faber, 1982), An Artist of the Floating World (Putnam, 1986), The Unconsoled (Knopf, 1995), When We Were Orphans (Knopf, 2000), and Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009).
This story has been updated with further information.
