Kazuo Ishiguro described the award as “flabbergastingly flattering.” That’s a little choppy for a guy known for tight, restrained writing. But we’ll cut him some slack since he had just won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature for his work in books such as The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant.

+ Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks. (I once spent four and a half weeks honing a headline pun.)