Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro - Kazuo Ishiguro: The Buried Giant - launch signing held at Waterstones Piccadilly. - London, United Kingdom - Monday 2nd March 2015

Granta List – A Who’s Who Of International Female Authors

By Jack de Aguilar in Lifestyle / Showbiz on 16 April 2013

Kazuo Ishiguro

For the first time, the list is dominated by female writers

Authors with backgrounds in China, Nigeria, Ghana, the US, Bangladesh and Pakistan were all recognised in a predominantly female Granta List – the first time the list has been dominated by women.

The names are (deep breath): Naomi Alderman, Tahmima Anam, Ned Beauman, Jenni Fagan, Adam Foulds, Xiaolu Guo, Sarah Hall, Steven Hall, Joanna Kavenna, Benjamin Markovits, Nadifa Mohamed, Helen Oyeyemi, Ross Raisin, Sunjeev Sahota, Taiye Selasi, Kamila Shamsie, Zadie Smith, David Szalay, Adam Thirlwell and Evie Wyld. "From satirists to humorists to sweeping epic-spinners, these writers have a command of language and their form which is simply astonishing. They show that the novel has a bold, brilliant future in Britain," said Granta editor John Freeman. Several writers already have an established market, like Adam Foulds, whose book, The Quickening Maze was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Boooker prize, while Sarah Hall's The Electric Michelangelo was shortlisted in 2004 and How to Paint a Dead Man was longlisted in 2009. One of the more interesting entrants was Sunjeev Sahota, who, according to Freeman, "had never read a novel until he was 18 – until he bought Midnight's Children at Heathrow. He studied maths, he works in marketing and finance; he lives in Leeds, completely out of the literary world."

Kazuo Ishiguro was recognised by Granta in 1983, and has gone on to write successful films

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Kazuo Ishiguro Saturday 20th October 2012 BFI London Film Festival Awards held at the Banqueting House - Arrivals.

Kazuo Ishiguro and Old Billingsgate Sunday 4th December 2011 The British Independent film awards 2011 at Old Billingsgate Market London, England

Kazuo Ishiguro Wednesday 13th October 2010 The 54th Times BFI London Film Festival - Never Let Me Go - Photocall London, England

Carey Mulligan and Kazuo Ishiguro - Carey Mulligan and Kazuo Ishiguro Toronto, Canada - The 35th Toronto International Film Festival - Monday 13th September 2010

The White Countess Review

By Matt McKillop

Very Good

Audiences can expect one thing from the filmmaking team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory: a Merchant Ivory film isn't meant to be watched, like other movies; it's meant to be visited, like a museum. While the results are sometimes dazzling and rich, and at others times stuffy and inert, the Merchant Ivory approach is nonetheless consistent. Each of their scripts lies somewhere between screenplay and novel. The attention they pay to period detail is lavish. And a Merchant Ivory cast typically reads like a roster of the world's leading thespians. Their most recent effort, The White Countess, is no different.

In it, all the Merchant Ivory hallmarks are present. The stalwart cast is led by Ralph Fiennes and a trio of Redgraves: Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, and Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave's daughter. The setting -- Shanghai in the period leading up to the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 -- is lush and meticulously rendered. And the script, loosely adapted from Junichiro Tanizaki's novel The Diary of a Mad Old Man, was penned by acclaimed writer Kazuo Ishiguro.

Continue reading: The White Countess Review

The White Countess Review

By Matt McKillop

Very Good

Audiences can expect one thing from the filmmaking team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory: a Merchant Ivory film isn't meant to be watched, like other movies; it's meant to be visited, like a museum. While the results are sometimes dazzling and rich, and at others times stuffy and inert, the Merchant Ivory approach is nonetheless consistent. Each of their scripts lies somewhere between screenplay and novel. The attention they pay to period detail is lavish. And a Merchant Ivory cast typically reads like a roster of the world's leading thespians. Their most recent effort, The White Countess, is no different.

In it, all the Merchant Ivory hallmarks are present. The stalwart cast is led by Ralph Fiennes and a trio of Redgraves: Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, and Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave's daughter. The setting -- Shanghai in the period leading up to the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 -- is lush and meticulously rendered. And the script, loosely adapted from Junichiro Tanizaki's novel The Diary of a Mad Old Man, was penned by acclaimed writer Kazuo Ishiguro.

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The Saddest Music In The World Review

By Jules Brenner

Excellent

The Saddest Music in the World starts off in the style of a dream, with impressionistic sets that are obviously stage props, grainy, low resolution black and white images obscured even further by fog or filtration, and stylized dialogue that seems more representational than real. But, about the time you expect the dreamer to awake and the film quality to revert to a slick 35mm normality, it doesn't. If this is a dream, or a vision, or the manifestation of a mind driven by mad storytelling technique, it's all part of the concept.

All of which seems to further 2003 as the year of the outlandish fantasy. As Sylvain Chomet's singular vision brought us a work derived purely from an irrepressibly inventive mind with The Triplets of Belleville, here Canadian director Guy Maddin (Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Fleshpots of Antiquity) works from a co-authored original screenplay with Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) in a manner that combines the storytelling and musical vitality of Topsy-Turvy with the visual imagery out of the German expressionism of F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, The Phantom) but with its own richness of character. I call it "high concept 8mm."

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