Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro is the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, awarded for revealing "[with] great emotional force [the] abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world," the Swedish Academy announced today.
The author takes home a 9 million crown ($1.1 million) prize.
Ishiguro is perhaps best known for The Remains of the Day, a powerful novel of love and duty that took the Man Booker Prize in 1989. The book was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
He has also been acclaimed for works like When We Were Orphans, though younger readers perhaps best remember him for Never Let Me Go, a novel Time considered one of the best of the last decade. The book was adapted into another acclaimed film, this time starring Carey Mulligan.
Ishiguro's latest book, The Buried Giant, was unusual fare for him, seeing that it was a fantasy novel he spent a decade bringing to life.
Ishiguro's win came as a surprise to avid readers and bibliophiles, though one smaller than the surprise that greeted 2016's award being given to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
Though an acclaimed writer, Ishiguro is an interesting choice, because he isn't a name frequently found on lists of nominees, which often include authors like Haruki Murakami, Adunis, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nawal El Saadawi, and Javier Marías.
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