English author and novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, has been named winner of the 2017 Nobel prize in literature.
While the result dashed the hope of many
Africans who had expected Ngugi Wa Thiongo would get it, the BBC
reports that the author of the novels titled The Remains of the Day and
Never Let Me Go, was praised by the Swedish Academy as a writer “who, in
novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our
illusory sense of connection with the world”.
With writers, such as Margaret Atwood,
Ngugi and Haruki Murakami leading the odds at the bookmakers, Ishiguro
was a surprise choice.
But his blue-chip literary credentials
return the award to more familiar territory after last year’s
controversial selection of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
The 62-year-old writer said the award
was “flabbergasting flattering”.He has written eight books, which have
been translated into over 40 languages.
He told the BBC that he hadn’t been contacted by the Nobel committee and wasn’t sure whether it was a hoax.
“It’s a magnificent honour, mainly
because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that
have lived, so that’s a terrific commendation,” he said
Ishiguro said he hoped the Nobel Prize would be a force for good.
He said,”The world is in a very
uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel prizes would be a force
for something positive in the world as it is at the moment.”
“I’ll be deeply moved if I could in some
way be part of some sort of climate this year in contributing to some
sort of positive atmosphere at a very uncertain time.”
Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, he
moved to England with his family when his father was offered a post as
an oceanographer in Surrey
He read English and philosophy at the
University of Kent after a year’s gap that included working as a grouse
beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral.
He studied an MA in creative writing at
the University of East Anglia, where his tutors were Malcolm Bradbury
and Angela Carter. His thesis became his critically acclaimed first
novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982. He won the Booker Prize
in 1989 for The Remains of the Day.
No comments:
Post a Comment