British author Kazuo Ishiguro has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The prize committee in Sweden says Ishiguro, through his novels, has “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
The committee said the 62-year-old author was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He moved to Britain when he was five-years-old.
Ishiguro has written numerous novels, but the committee said on Twitter his most celebrated work was The Remains of the Day, a story about a butler at an English country estate.
The novel was turned into a movie featuring Academy Award winners Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Swedish academy secretary Sara Danius said Ishiguro is “a writer of great dignity” who has “developed an aesthetic universe all his own.”
“He is a little bit like a mix of Jane Austen, comedy of manners and Franz Kafka. If you mix this a little, not too much, you get Ishiguro in a nutshell,” Danius said.
As the recipient of the $1.1 million prize, the world’s most prestigious literary award, Ishiguro joins the ranks of Doris Lessing and Ernest Hemingway.
The recipient last year was poet/songwriter Bob Dylan, an influential contributor to popular music and culture for the past half century.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 110 times between 1901 and 2017, according to NobelPrize.Org.