Biography

Kazuo Ishiguro

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Kazuo Ishiguro was born on November 8, 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan. He is a writer and producer, known for Living (2022), The Remains of the Day (1993) and Never Let Me Go (2010). He has been married to Lorna Anne MacDougall since 1986. They have one child.

Grew up in Guildford, Surrey where he attracted attention in the neighborhood by being the only Japanese child. In his teens, he wanted to be a rock star - actually in 1973, Ishiguro worked for a time as a grousebeater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle in Aberdeen, Scotland - however in 1983, he became a full-time writer.
One of his teachers in the creative-writing program at the University of East Anglia was Angela Carter.
Received his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in English and philosophy from the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) (1978). Received his Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in English and literature from the University of East Anglia (UEA) (1980).
Awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature on 10 December 2017.
He was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star by the Government of Japan in 2018 for his services to literature.

Idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times. Plato suggests it can be like that with the search for the meaning of the good. You shouldn't get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you've discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching.
[on Living (2022)] I can take credit for having the original idea, because it was kind of an obsession of mine for years. It was partly because I was a Japanese kid growing up in England and I was always very interested in any Japanese film that was shown in England. From the age of 11 or 12, I was obsessed with the original Kurosawa movie, Ikiru (1952). And as I got older, I had this idea that wouldn't it be great if someone made a version set in England. I just thought it would be a very interesting effect to put that story, the Kurosawa story, into a British setting just after the second World War. I could see it would become much more than just a remake. This was an idea I had for a long time, but I'm not a screenwriter, and I just hoped somebody else would make it. It was really in that spirit that I talked about it half-jokingly at a dinner party 3 or 4 years ago. It wasn't even a dinner party, it was a small gathering with myself and my wife and Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen, the two producers. We called Bill Bill Nighy on the telephone after we finished eating... [Dec. 2022]

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