The 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature and its 9m Swedish krona purse ($1,095,939.52) was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro in a ceremony broadcast live online. The British author has written seven novels, most recently The Buried Giant, and in 1989 he won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day. As of this morning’s standings on popular British betting site Ladbrokes, Ishiguro was not in the top-three most likely Nobel laureates, and so his victory comes as a surprise – albeit a much more mild one than last year’s left field selection of Bob Dylan.
Ishiguro’s novels have long been favorites of Millions readers. His name has popped up in many of our Year in Reading entries, and his sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, earned a spot on our 2009 “Best of the Millennium” series. “They say that most novelists end up writing the same book over and over again: a truth which manifests itself differently in the work of different novelists,” wrote Elif Batuman. “In the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, it takes the form of an incredibly elegant formal unity.”
His work also takes the form of surprise, as noted by Millions editor Lydia Kiesling:
It is a great thing to be surprised by a novelist. … The surprise in a large part of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work is that he changes the very quality of the world in some subtle but deeply alarming way; suddenly the sky is a gray shade, your own voice vibrates at a slightly different frequency, and an atonal humming sound wafts on the breeze.
The bar for participating in post-Nobel activities was set unbelievably low last year, when surprise winner Bob Dylan went two months before even acknowledging his honor. It’s doubtful this year’s winner will continue that trend.