Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature today. Two of the novelists best-known works were adapted to film, most notably The Remains of the Day, a 1989 novel transformed into an eight-Oscar-nominated 1993 James Ivory-directed British-American drama Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, James Fox, Christopher Reeve, Hugh Grant and Ben Chaplin.

Mark Romanek’s 2010 film Never Let Me Go, starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, was based on Ishiguro’s 2005 dystopian alternative-history novel of the same name.

Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of The Swedish Academy, described the 62-year-old Ishiguro as a “mix of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka,” adding, “but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix.”

Ishiguro’s novels – A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005), The Buried Giant (2015) – often defy genre boundaries.

Never Let Me Go, for example, seemed on the surface a love triangle set at a typically gray, rainy British boarding school, until readers become aware that the school is populated by clones created as medical surplus.