British author Kazuo Ishiguro has won this year's Nobel Prize In Literature.
The author was born in Japan in 1954, but moved to the UK when he was five years old. He studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, before publishing his first novel, A Pale View of the Hills, in 1982. Ishiguro's other novels include The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains Of The Day, which was turned into an Oscar-nominated 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Ishiguro, whose book themes are associated with memory, time and self-delusion, has also penned scripts for film and television.
JOIN US IN CONGRATULATING KAZUO ISHIGURO!
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2017
Just awarded the 2017 #NobelPrize in Literature. pic.twitter.com/IcrfgN2prn
Fellow Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie issued a statement saying, "Many congratulations to my old friend Ish, whose work I’ve loved and admired ever since I first read A Pale View of Hills. And he plays the guitar and writes songs too! Roll over Bob Dylan."
Listen: Kazuo Ishiguro talks to the RTÉ Book Show.
The Nobel judges said that Ishiguro had "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" in novels of "great emotional force".
Ishiguro joins a prestigious list of Nobel laureates that include Irish writers W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett, alongside the likes of Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Ellot, Saul Bellow, Doris Lessing and last year's controversial winner, Bob Dylan.
In recent years, he has also co-written a number of songs for Grammy winning jazz singer Stacey Kent, who performs their collaborations with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at Dublin's National Concert Hall on Wednesday, October 11th - details here.
