English author, Kazuo Ishiguro has been named winner of the 2017 Nobel prize for literature.
Ishiguro was praised by the Swedish Academy for his “novels of great emotional force”, which it said had “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
Ishiguro beat literature greats like Margaret Atwood, Africa’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami to the award on Thursday.
Even though Ishiguro was a surprise choice, this year’s awards is a relief to many watchers as it returned the award to more familiar territory after last year’s controversial choice of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
The Stockholm based Academy said the works of Ishiguro, including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, is “marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place”.
Awarded since 1901, the 9m Swedish krona (£832,000) Nobel prize for literature is for the writing of an author who, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s bequest, “shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Ishiguro becomes the 114th winner, following in the footsteps of names including Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Mo Yan and Pablo Neruda.
If Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had won the prize, he would have been the seventh African to win it, after Algeria’s Camus Albert, Egypt’s Mahfouz Naguib, Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, South Africa’s Gordmier Nadin and Coetzee Maxwell and Zimbabwe’s Lessin Doris.
