Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro Once Wrote A Screenplay About Eating A Ghost

In the early 1980s, the BBC approached novelist Kazuo Ishiguro — this year's Nobel laureate for literature – and asked if he would write a television screenplay. He agreed, quit his day job, and wrote The Gourmet – an absurdist, gothic satire about hunger in its many dimensions: physical, spiritual and sensual. His exploration of what food means to different sections of society — bread for the poor, a circus for the rich — is as strikingly relevant today as it was 30 years ago.

The Gourmet is set largely in a London church that offers a soup kitchen and overnight shelter for the city's tramps. The scriptural roots of its charitable mission are proclaimed on a plaque carrying a quotation from St. Mathew's gospel:

I was hungry and you gave me food