Which British author of Never Let Me Go won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of Never Let Me Go, won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy honored his novels for uncovering the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain with his family as a child. His fiction frequently explores memory, self-deception, emotional restraint and the stories people tell themselves to live with loss. Those themes appear in both his historical novel The Remains of the Day and his speculative work Never Let Me Go.

Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, uses science-fiction elements to examine friendship, mortality, exploitation and what it means to be human. Its genre setting is distinctive, but the novel’s emotional focus is typical of Ishiguro’s wider career.

The Nobel announcement came on 5 October 2017, and Ishiguro delivered his Nobel lecture in December. A common mix-up is confusing him with Salman Rushdie or Ian McEwan, prominent British authors who had often been discussed as possible future laureates.