Stockholm: Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of “The Remains of the Day”, won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for a series of “exquisite” novels that the jury said had mixed Franz Kafka with Jane Austen.
The 62-year-old writer called the news “flabbergastingly flattering” and said he initially thought it was a hoax. He told reporters that his wife had rushed home from the hairdresser after seeing messages on her phone.
“It comes at a time when the world is uncertain about its values, its leadership and its security. I only hope that receiving this tremendous honor will cheer the armed forces on forever,” Ishiguro said.
The award of the $9 million ($1.1 million) award marks a return to a more mainstream interpretation of literature a year after it went to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
Ishiguro is the first Briton to win the world’s most prestigious literary award in ten years, since Doris Lessing was recognized in 2007.
He said he was sitting in the kitchen when his agents called and let him listen in on the Nobel announcement live over the phone, not knowing he would win.
“I thought it was a hoax in this day and age of fake news. So I asked them to check,” he said at his home in north London.
“In the end a very nice lady from Sweden called and asked me first if I wanted to accept it… I was amazed at how low-key they were, it was like they invited me to some kind of party.”
His best-known work, “The Remains of the Day,” won the Man Booker Prize in 1989 and became an Oscar-nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins as a demanding and oppressed butler in post-war Britain.
“GREAT EMOTIONAL POWER”
“He’s an outstanding novelist. I would say that if you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, you get Ishiguro in a nutshell,” Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which selects the literature winner, told Reuters.
The Academy praised Ishiguro’s ability to “reveal the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection to the world … in novels of great emotional power” involving memory, time, and self-deception.
Ishiguro’s latest novel, “The Buried Giant,” in which an elderly couple goes on a road trip through an Arthurian England populated by ogres and dragons, “explores…how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality”, the Academy said.
He told reporters he was currently in talks to work on a graphic novel.
Ishiguro was born in Japan and grew up in Great Britain.
“I’ve always said throughout my career that even though I grew up in this country and was educated in this country, a big part of my way of looking at the world, my artistic approach, is Japanese, because I was raised by Japanese parents who spoke in Japanese,” he said Thursday.
Ishiguro has entered British politics throughout his career, calling the growing hostility towards immigrants following the Brexit vote “a fight for Britain’s soul”.
He takes his place alongside previous winners including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway.
Named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, the prize has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.