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Watch: Renowned British novelist didn't believe he'd won Nobel Prize until BBC called to confirm

October 6, 2017

Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro was in such disbelief that he'd won the Nobel Literature Prize yesterday that he asked the BBC to confirm it wasn't "false news".

The novelist, famous for his books The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, gave an interview to the BBC outlining his shock at winning the prestigious honour.

"I only started to believe this was true when the BBC rang me. In this age of false news I thought it was perhaps a mistake," Mr Ishiguro told the BBC.

The selection of the 62-year-old Ishiguro marked a return to citing fiction writers following two years of unconventional choices by the Swedish Academy for the prize.

It also continues a recent trend of giving the award to British authors born elsewhere — V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 winner, is from Trinidad and Tobago; the 2007 honoree, Doris Lessing, was a native of Iran who grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

"Some of the themes that I have tried to tackle in my work — about history, about not just personal memory but the way countries and nations and communities remember their past, and how often they bury the uncomfortable memories from the past," Ishiguro said yesterday, speaking in his backyard in north London.

Ishiguro already was one of Britain's most celebrated writers, winning the Booker for The Remains of the Day, receiving an Order of the British Empire medal and appearing frequently on lists of the country's greatest authors.

The academy called Ishiguro's eight books, which also include An Artist of the Floating World and The Buried Giant, works of emotional force that uncover "the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."

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