The Nobel Prize for Literature: Pinnacle of acclaim for Kazuo Ishiguro

It took a Nobel prize, the joke in literary circles went, for authors to really make a reputation. How else would anyone outside Russia have heard of Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 prize winner? Or of Patrick Modiano, who won it the year before? Even our own Rabindranath Tagore would hardly have been known the world over had it not been for his Nobel win.

Kazuo Ishiguro, this year's winner, is an exception to this joke. The Nobel, in his case, crowns a career that's speckled with several prizes and awards, beginning fairly early on in his writing career — the Booker in 1989, the OBE in 1995, and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres three years later.

More important, critical acclaim, in Ishiguro's case, has been accompanied by popular endorsement. The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005) feature regularly on "best books" lists — helped along, no doubt, by their cinematic adaptations. But there's a dedicated following of many of his lesser known works, especially A Pale View of Hills, his debut novel about a Japanese woman in Britain whose elder daughter has committed suicide, and The Unconsoled, the surreal narrative of a musician who is in an unfamiliar city for a performance, but can't remember what he's supposed to be doing or who he's supposed to be meeting.

Undoubtedly, much of the international publicity that has accompanied Ishiguro's Nobel is because he writes in English — the third most widely spoken language in the world, and the language with the most heft in the global publishing industry. The Nobel jury, to be fair, has regularly skirted the Anglophone bias, turning its gaze to important, little-known writers from other languages such as Chinese (Mo Yan, 2012), Spanish (Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010) and Turkic (Orhan Pamuk, 2006) — to name three recent awardees.

Perhaps, what's truly surprising about Ishiguro's win is the fact that the Nobel jury have settled for an author who's so mainstream, so much, really, a literary superstar already. So much the better for Ishiguro fans — their tribe will now increase.