‘Since his early novels, A Pale View of Hills and The Artist of the Floating World,  till his most recent, The Buried Giant,  Kazuo Ishiguro has created a series of memorably delicate and poignant stories about human predicaments of our time. With his quiet and thoughtful voice, he faces up to difficult themes, and probes, with unsurpassed sensitivity, the burden of the past and the responsibility to the future, the balance between memory and forgetting, survival and destruction,  and the nature of love. Ishiguro thinks with his imagination. His fiction experiments with possibilities – it is storytelling as philosophy.

This is a proud day for the Royal Society of Literature, where Kazuo has been a Fellow since 1989, but above all a very, very happy day for literature, especially literature written in English.’

Dame Marina Warner, RSL President