“When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart.”

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.