‘AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: Kazuo Ishiguro on the future of fiction and truth

On the 20th anniversary of Never Let Me Go, the Nobel prize-winning novelist talks about the role of the author in a post-truth world – and why he’s ‘not a great writer of prose’• Anne Enright and others celebrate 20 years of Never Let Me GoI arrive at Kazuo Ishiguro’s central London flat on an iron-cold, blustery and grey day, and am immediately absorbed into a scene of quiet comfort and calm; the lights are low, the furnishings white, the coffee – made by Ishiguro’s wife, Lorna, before she absents herself to go to the cinema – hot and delicious. Ishiguro, now 70 and in receipt of a Nobel prize in literature and a knighthood, has fetched the elegant cakes himself, and is immediately solicitous. Am I chilly? Am I hungry? Am I worried whether my device will record our conversation?It’s an attentiveness to minute, even mundane detail that is evident in all his work. From The Unconsoled to The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro is the creator of some of the most unsettling and memorable fiction of the last 40 years. But perhaps no book of his is more loved than his sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, which has outsold all his others and been adapted not only into a major film but now a stage production. Continue reading...

Mar 8, 2025 - 10:28
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‘AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: Kazuo Ishiguro on the future of fiction and truth

On the 20th anniversary of Never Let Me Go, the Nobel prize-winning novelist talks about the role of the author in a post-truth world – and why he’s ‘not a great writer of prose’

Anne Enright and others celebrate 20 years of Never Let Me Go

I arrive at Kazuo Ishiguro’s central London flat on an iron-cold, blustery and grey day, and am immediately absorbed into a scene of quiet comfort and calm; the lights are low, the furnishings white, the coffee – made by Ishiguro’s wife, Lorna, before she absents herself to go to the cinema – hot and delicious. Ishiguro, now 70 and in receipt of a Nobel prize in literature and a knighthood, has fetched the elegant cakes himself, and is immediately solicitous. Am I chilly? Am I hungry? Am I worried whether my device will record our conversation?

It’s an attentiveness to minute, even mundane detail that is evident in all his work. From The Unconsoled to The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro is the creator of some of the most unsettling and memorable fiction of the last 40 years. But perhaps no book of his is more loved than his sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, which has outsold all his others and been adapted not only into a major film but now a stage production. Continue reading...