Remains Of The Day author Ishiguro wins Nobel for works of ‘great emotional force’

British author Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize in literature for his novels of “great emotional force”.

Ishiguro, 62, is most famous for The Remains Of The Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005).

The writer was born in Japan but moved to the UK when he was five.

Judges of the prize, worth nine million Swedish kronor (around £842,000), said he had “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” in novels of “great emotional force”.

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The Remains Of The Day, his third novel, was turned into a film starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

The Man Booker Prize winner later told The Guardian that he wrote the bulk of the book in just four weeks and in free-hand.

“I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a ‘crash’,” he said.

“During the ‘crash’, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone.

“No-one would come to the house. This, fundamentally, was how The Remains Of The Day was written.”

Ishiguro, whose book themes are associated with memory, time and self-delusion, has also penned scripts for film and television.

He graduated in English and philosophy at the University of Kent in the 1970s, before studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

His debut book was A Pale View Of Hills in 1982.

British writers Doris Lessing and Harold Pinter previously won the Nobel award, which last year went to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.

Among those to congratulate Ishiguro was the Seamus Heaney Estate, which wrote: “Huge congratulations to Kazuo Ishiguro on winning the Nobel Prize in Literature! SH would be delighted.”