Remains of the Day author Ishiguro wins Nobel prize for literature

The award of the 9-millioncrown prize marks a return to a more mainstream interpretation of literature after it went to the American troubadour Dylan

Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of Remains of the Day, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday, honouring an "exquisite novelist" a year after giving it to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.

Born in Japan and raised in Britain, Ishiguro, 62, won the Man Booker Prize for the 1989 novel that was made into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Anthony Hopkins as a fastidious and repressed butler in postwar Britain. "He is an exquisite novelist. I would say if you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka you get Ishiguro in a nutshell, Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the