Happy Birthday, Kazuo!

Today in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, Kazuo Ishigura was born. His family moved to Great Britain when he was six, and he has become one of the great writers in the English language, winning the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second novel ,An Artist of the Floating World, and the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third, The Remains of the Day, and being shortlisted for the Booker for When We Were Orphans and his most recent book Never Let Me Go. Ishigura explores memory in his books, and the clash of memory with rezlity - The Unconsoled is a tour-de-force of shifting memory - and his novels are fascinating. Not one of these guys who turns out a book every year (every five or six years, more likely), he's well worth the wait for the next one.