Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of such novels as The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy announced the award this morning, citing Ishiguro’s “novels of great emotional force … [that have] uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said. “Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings.”

Ishiguro’s publisher at Faber & Faber, Stephen Page, said, “He has an emotional force as well as an intellectual curiosity, that always finds enormous numbers of readers. His work is challenging at times, and stretching, but because of that emotional force, it so often resonates with readers. He’s a literary writer who is very widely read around the world.”

Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day won the Man Booker Prize when it was published in 1989, and was turned into an Academy Award–nominated film. Never Let Me Go was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted into a movie in 2005. His other novels include A Pale View of the Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, and his latest, The Buried Giant.

Image Credit: Nobelprize.org