Sir Kazuo Ishiguro's Biography

Who is Kazuo Ishiguro?

Kazuo Ishiguro was born on 8 November 1954 to Shizuo and Shizuko Ishiguro. Originally from Nagasaki in Japan, Ishiguro came to Britain when he was just six and attended a boys' grammar school in Surrey.

Kazuo Ishiguro had a spell as a grouse beater for the Queen Mother, before studying English and Philosophy to Kent University and then enrolling on the famous creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. In between, Ishiguro was a community worker in Glasgow.

In 1980 Ishiguro started to publish articles and short stories and from 1984 he started writing TV plays.

Ishiguro's novels have achieved widespread acclaim. In particular, An Artist of the Floating World won the Whitbread Book of the Year and Remains of the Day (1989) won the Booker Prize.

His fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, was also shortlisted for the Booker.

Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the OBE in 1995 for services to literature.

In October 2017, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was knighted the following year.

In 2021, he wrote Klara and the Sun.

In 2022, he wrote the screenplay to the film Living, a remake of Kurosawa's Ikiru. For which, he was nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Synopsis: A thriller about pupils at an elite school, who discover they are being groomed for a life of organ donation.

The Guardian gave an amusing and succinct precis of critical comment on Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go:

""Kazuo Ishiguro writes like an alien," declared Caroline Moore in the Sunday Telegraph, and his sixth novel Never Let Me Go struck her as "a cross between The Caretaker and Arthur C Clarke".

"Science fiction is "a new departure for Ishiguro", noted Tobias Hill in the Times, who found the book "as moving and horrific as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or John Wyndham's The Chrysalids".

""This very weird book is as intricate, subtly upsetting and moving as any Ishiguro has written," wrote Geoff Dyer in the Independent, but Philip Hensher in the Spectator found it "totally implausible on every level ... I believed so little in any of the people, their situation, or the way they spoke that I didn't really care what happened to them. They could have been turned into tins of Pedigree Chum without raising much concern."

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