After last year's unconventional decision to give Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, the panel went a more traditional route this year: The winner announced Thursday is British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, perhaps best known as the author of Remains of the Day. Ishiguro, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world," says the Nobel press release. Other works include The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, and, more recently, The Buried Giant.
Ishiguro won the Man Booker Prize for Remains of the Day in 1989, per the Guardian, and the novel was turned into a popular film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. “Ishiguro’s writings are marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place,” the prize committee wrote, per the New York Times. “At the same time, his more recent fiction contains fantastic features.” His 2005 work Never Let Me Go added a "cold undercurrent of science fiction" to the author's work, it adds. (More Nobel Prize in literature stories.)