*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available to preorder*
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's greatest writers. David Lodge, chairman of the judges in 1989, said, it's "a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance". This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Ishiguro's work has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside, but also into his own past. Reflecting on his years of service, he must re-examine his life in the face of changing Britain, and question whether his dignity and properness have come at a greater cost to himself.
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 and came to Britain at the age of five. He attended the University of Kent and studied English Literature and Philosophy, and later enrolled in an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of the novels A Pale View of Hills (winner of the Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (winner of the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Premio Scanno, and shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (winner of the 1989 Booker Prize) and When We Were Orphans (shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize and Whitbread Novel of the Year).
Kazuo Ishiguro's books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. The Remains of the Day became an international bestseller, with over a million copies sold in the English language alone, and was adapted into an award-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
In 1995 Ishiguro received an OBE for Services to Literature, and in 1998 the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.