Kazuo Ishiguro Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro's literary reputation was established by three novels published over seven years: A Pale View of Hills won the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize for the best first novel of 1982; An Artist of the Floating World won the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, the largest cash prize for literature in Britain; and The Remains of the Day received the 1989 Booker Prize, Britain's highest literary award. As impressive as the prizes he received during that period, however, is Ishiguro's passion for re-creating his art. He distanced himself from the "new internationalism" in British literature, an association prompted in part by the Japanese settings of his first two novels, by focusing his third on that most English of archetypes, the butler. Then, rejecting the mistaken praise for that work's "realism," Ishiguro invented an unquestionably surreal world for his fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995). These diverse fictions are linked, nonetheless, by the author's consistent interest in narrative unreliability, a technique he has used with great effect in the development of his plots, in the complexity of his characters, and in the manipulation of his readers.

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