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Literary Awards

Two Japanese authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature

[UPDATED: 10-10-2017]

Two Japanese authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yasunari Kawabata in 1968 “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind” and Kenzaburo Oe in 1994 “who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

When it announced the award the Nobel committee cited three of Kawabata’s novels Snow Country, Thousand Cranes and The Old Capital; while Oe is known for titles associated with his disabled son such as A Healing Family and Father, Where are you going?

In 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro, probably best known as author of The Remains of the Day a novel about a British aristocrat’s butler, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki in 1954, moved to the United Kingdom from Japan when he was five and lives in Golders Green, North London. He is a British citizen and writes in English.

Two Japanese authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature Posted March 22nd, 2017 by Richard Nathan

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Factbook

Two Japanese authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature

New international standards for measuring time, weights and measures encouraged some to call for Japan to adopt a Westernised writing system abandoning traditional alphabets[UPDATED: 7-7-2023]

In 1841 Shakespeare’s name appeared in print in Japan in Japanese for the first time[UPDATED: 6-14-2023]

Japan experts, Japanologists, commentators, as well as visitors to Japan, have been deriding each other’s ‘Knowledge’ of the nation for over a century[UPDATED: 5-10-2023]

By 1905 Japanese people were already buying the ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’ on subscription and their prompt payment was used to highlight the trustworthiness of the nation[UPDATED: 4-3-2023]

By the early 1900s so many books had been published ‘Explaining Japan’ that one author felt compelled to write a book summarising them[UPDATED: 3-22-2023]

In the 1870s Japanese bookshops already sold Western books targeting Japan’s growing student population[UPDATED: 3-1-2023]

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