JEFF COTTENDEN
Kazuo IshiguroJEFF COTTENDENJapanese-born writer Kazuo Ishiguro, 62, won the 2017 Literature prize. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to England at the age of five. Ishiguro, who writes in English, is the author of eight books, the first of which was published in 1982. Two have been adapted for cinema: The Remains of the Day (1989), winner of the Booker Prize, and Never Let Me Go (2005). In Brazil, Companhia das Letras has published five of his books, including When We Were Orphans (2000), Nocturnes (2009), and his most recent novel, The Buried Giant (2015). According to the Swedish Academy, the key themes of Ishiguro’s literary career are memory, time, and self-delusion. After the announcement, secretary of the academy Sara Danius explained that Ishiguro shows a concern with understanding the past in his writing. “He is not out to redeem the past, he is exploring what you have to forget in order to survive in the first place as an individual or as a society.” In an interview published on the Nobel Prize website, the writer expressed his surprise at winning the prize the year after Bob Dylan, who has been his hero since he was 13 years old. Ishiguro gave a lecture at the University of São Paulo (USP) about 20 years ago, at the invitation of the British Council.
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