Biografia

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954. In 1960 his family moved to England, where he has lived ever since. "Today," he says, "I have that sense of having just left without saying goodbye and of this whole other world just kind of fading away.... I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one." 
Ishiguro was schooled at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of East Anglia. As a boy he dreamed of becoming a musician. For a while he played at clubs and sent demo tapes to music publishers, all of whom rejected them: "They would listen to them for fifteen seconds and say 'Hideous! Don't like it, mate. Get out!'"

Ishiguro claims to have "drifted into" writing. "It wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do," he admits and speculates that writing "may be a consolation for something that got broken. The activity of re-creating the world on the page, finding alternative worlds, is a way of trying to fix that thing or caress that wound...a wound that will never heal." Yet he also defines himself as a "writer who wishes to write international novels. What is an 'international' novel? I believe it to be one, quite simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world. It may concern characters who jet across continents, but may just as easily be set firmly in one locality." 

Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of four novels. His first, A Pale View of Hills, was awarded the Winifred Holtby Prize by the Royal Society of Literature. Since then, he has published An Artist of the Floating World, which won the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and The Remains of the Day, winner of the 1989 Booker Prize and the basis for an Academy Award-nominated film which starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Kazuo Ishiguro lives in London with his wife and daughter.

(Biography provided by Random House)