Kazuo Ishiguro

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (Japanese: 石黒 一雄, Hepburn: Ishiguro Kazuo; /kæˈzuː.oʊ ˌɪʃɪˈɡuroʊ, ˈkæzu.oʊ/; born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded several major literary prizes, including the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960 with his parents when he was five. His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were noted for their explorations of Japanese identity and their mournful tone. He has since explored themes more typically associated with science fiction and historical fiction, while continuing a focus on the outsider's perspective, the search for an unattainable truth, and the sense of recent history as a spider's web in which humans vainly struggle.