Kazuo Ishiguro on Life, Death, and the Movies
Kazuo Ishiguro has had a busy few months. The acclaimed novelist has been attending film festivals and walking red carpets to promote the film Living, for which he wrote the screenplay. Living—a remake of the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa, which was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan IIyich—is set in 1950s London and stars Bill Nighy as Rodney Williams, a senior bureaucrat in the Public Works department who is dying of cancer. The film has been an awards season darling, and this January Ishiguro was nominated for an Academy Award, his first, for best adapted screenplay.
No stranger to big awards, Ishiguro has won the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2019 received a knighthood for his contribution to literature. His novels include 1989’s , a slim tour de force about a loyal English butler, which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie with , and 2021’s , about).
