Japan-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for The Remains of the Day, which was adapted for the big screen with stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson and director James Ivory, has won the Nobel Prize for literature, organizers of the award said Thursday.

His novel Never Let Me Go got a film adaptation, which starred Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield and was directed by Mark Romanek.

They lauded the winner for having "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."

View image on TwiThe literature honor, presented by the Swedish Academy, is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine and the Nobel Peace Prize.
Since 1901, the literature prize has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, according to Nobel's will, written "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction." 

Past laureates include U.S. writers Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow, Britain's Harold Pinter and William Golding, Ireland's Samuel Beckett, Canada's Alice Munro, South Africa's Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chile's Pablo Neruda, France's Jean-Paul Sartre, Germany's Gunter Grass, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk and China's Mo Yan. Last year, Bob Dylan won the award, becoming the first American to receive it since Morrison won it in 1993.

source: AFP