Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, Kazuo Ishiguro moved to England with his family in 1960. While the family lived in an upper-middle-class London suburb and Ishiguro attended English schools, he spoke Japanese at home, where his parents maintained his familiarity with Japanese culture. Ishiguro received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and literature from the University of Kent in 1978, and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in 1980. He published several short stories in an anthology of work by new writers while working on his master’s degree, and shortly thereafter he sold his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982). The following year, A Pale View of Hills won the Winifred Holtby Award from the Royal Society of Literature. Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1986. Both novels examine cultural tensions between Japan and the West: A Pale View of Hills follows the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman who marries an Englishman and immigrates to Britain, while An Artist of the Floating World is set in a small Japanese town in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II.
