London:​ Kazuo Ishiguro's wife was just settling into the hairdresser's chair when her phone rang. Then she made an apology her stylist was unlikely ever to have heard before.

"My husband might have won a Nobel Prize," she said. "Can I leave this for now?"

Lorna MacDougall returned to find the world's press on the doorstep of their north London home.

Ishiguro had become the first British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature since 2007.