Happy Birthday, Kazuo

Today in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, Kazuo Ishiguro 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 novel Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro explores memory in his books, and the clash of memory with reality - The Unconsoled is a tour-de-force of shifting memory - and his work is fascinating. Nocturnes is his latest, five short stories about "music and memory" and easily among his better work. 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.