Kazuo Ishiguro

Sebastian Groes (University of Wolverhampton); Revised By: Jennifer Gray (Tennessee Technological University)
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Kazuo Ishiguro is an Anglo-Japanese writer born in Nagasaki, Japan, whose crowning achievement to date is the critically acclaimed and bestselling novel 

The Remains of the Day

 (1989), which was turned into an equally successful Hollywood movie starring Anthony Hopkins. He is one of the finest authors within a generation of outstanding British writers that comprises Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, and Jeanette Winterson, emerging in the early 1980s. Ishiguro’s writing is characterised by unreliable first-person narrators who generate a tension between irony and empathy, clearly defined narrative boundaries and self-imposed representational rules. He crafts a meticulously precise prose, and…

4909 words

Citation: Groes, Sebastian, Jennifer Gray. "Kazuo Ishiguro". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 April 2009; last revised 28 October 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2318, accessed 19 March 2024.]

2318 Kazuo Ishiguro 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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