“Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.”

Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is known for fiction in English and for the wide recognition his work has received, including the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. Ishiguro writes across several forms, but he is best known for novels that probe memory, loss, and the fragile ties between people and the world around them. The Swedish Academy praised his work for its emotional force and for the way it reveals what lies beneath the feeling of connection.