“I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that--little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time--like somehow we were letting the side down.”

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.