Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954)

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki and brought to England at five. He has lived in Britain ever since. He writes in English about memory, loss, and the slow, precise ways in which human beings construct versions of their own lives that protect them from what they cannot face.

His most celebrated novel, The Remains of the Day, is narrated by Stevens, an English butler of the old school, who is driving across England and thinking about his years of service to a lord who turned out to hold fascist sympathies. Stevens does not allow himself to know this. His sentences are formal, oblique, impeccably correct — and vibrating with everything he has spent a lifetime refusing to feel.

This is Ishiguro's central technique: the narrator who does not know what they are telling you. Stevens describes his own life with perfect grammar and total incomprehension of what he is describing, and you read both things simultaneously — the surface account and the subterranean truth — without his permission. It is the hardest effect in fiction to produce and one of the most devastating to experience.

He received the Nobel Prize in 2017, awarded to a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."

His Nobel Lecture (2017), "My Twentieth Century Evening – and Other Small Breakthroughs", begins in 1979 with a young man nobody could place: Japanese features, hair to his shoulders, a drooping bandit moustache. Read it at NobelPrize.org.