After studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, he spent a year writing fiction, eventually gaining a Master of Arts in creative writing, and studied with writers like Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
Mr. Ishiguro stood out early among the literary crowd. In 1983, he was included in Granta magazine’s best of young British writers list, joining luminaries such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.
He published his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills,” about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England, in 1982, and followed with “An Artist of the Floating World,” narrated by an elderly Japanese painter, set in post-World War II Japan.
His deep understanding of the social conventions and affectations of his adopted homeland shaped his third novel, “The Remains of the Day,” which won the Booker Prize and featured a buttoned-up butler, who was later immortalized in a film starring Anthony Hopkins. Mr. Ishiguro, who writes his first drafts by hand, later said he had written the book in four weeks in a feverish rush.
When he published “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Ishiguro worried that he was repeating himself by writing another first-person novel with an unreliable narrator, but critics saw the book as an extreme departure.
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“I was afraid that people would say, ‘Oh, it’s the same book again, about an old guy looking back over his life with regret when it’s too late to change things,’” he told The Times. “Instead, they were saying, ‘Your books are always set in Japan; this is a giant leap for you.’ I get this with almost every book.”
A literary iconoclast, Mr. Ishiguro has played with genres like detective fiction, westerns, science fiction and fantasy in his novels. Critics viewed “The Unconsoled,” a surreal, dreamlike novel about a pianist in an unnamed European city, as magical realism when it came out in 1995. “When We Were Orphans” was viewed as a detective novel. His 2005 novel, “Never Let Me Go,” was regarded as yet another stylistic leap into futuristic science fiction, although it was set in the 1990s.
His most recent novel, “The Buried Giant,” defied expectations once again. A fantasy story set in Arthurian Britain, the novel centers on an older couple, Axl and Beatrice, who leave their village in search of their missing son, and encounter an old knight. Though the story was a full-blown fantasy, with ogres and a dragon, it was also a parable that explored many of the themes that have preoccupied Mr. Ishiguro throughout his career, including the fragile nature of individual and collective memory.
In selecting Mr. Ishiguro, the Swedish Academy, which has been criticized in the past for using the prize to make a political statement, seemed to focus on pure literary merit.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work rather than a single title. Winners have included international literary giants like Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. In other years, the academy has selected obscure European writers whose work was not widely read in English, including the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio (2008), the Romanian-German writer Herta Müller (2009), the Swedish poet and translator Tomas Transtromer (2011) and the French novelist Patrick Modiano (2014).
Of the 114 winners who have received the prize since it was first awarded in 1901, 14 have been women.
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