Kazuo Ishiguro wins 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

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The British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his novel “The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go”, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday at a ceremony in Stockholm.

The 62-year-old, praised for “his novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” by the Swedish Academy.

The screenshot of Nobel Prize official Twitter account.

With Canadian’s Margaret Atwood, Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Japan’s Haruki Murakami leading the odds at the betting service Ladbrokes, Ishiguro came as a surprise.

Born in Nagasaki, Japan, Ishiguro moved to Britain with his family when he was five, only returning to visit Japan as an adult.

The Swedish Academy's Sarah Danius described Ishiguro's writing as a mix of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, but added, "you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix. And then you stir, but not too much, and then you have his writings.”

“He's a writer of great integrity, doesn't look to the side. He's developed an aesthetic universe of his own,” Danius said.

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The novelist’s best-known work is likely "The Remains of the Day", which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins as the butler Stevens.

Apart from his eight well-known books, Ishiguro has also written scripts for film and television.