After reading the passages below, fill in the blanks to make the
passages coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word,
fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other
blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
"How should a Nobel
laureate dress?" asked Kazuo Ishiguro, who, 40 minutes earlier, had found
out he {#blank#}1{#/blank#}(award) the Nobel Prize
for Literature.
To say the news was unexpected
is an understatement. He literally couldn't believe it. Until that was, his
phone began to ring constantly, an orderly queue of TV crews started to form
outside his front door ("how do they all know where I live?"), and
his publishers dispatched a top team to his house as back-up.
This was not fake news. This was
delightful, surprising news. Maybe there were others who {#blank#}2{#/blank#} (win) instead, he wondered. "But that is
the nature of prizes. They are a lottery." {#blank#}3{#/blank#} chaos reigned around him, he was calm, assured
and thoughtful, talking (after nipping upstairs to fetch a smart jacket for our
interview) about his belief in the power of stories and {#blank#}4{#/blank#} those that he wrote would often explore wasted
lives and opportunities.
"I've always had a faith
that it should be possible, if you tell stories in a certain way, to transcend
barriers of race, class and ethnicity."
For me, he is one of the great
living writers working in any language. All writers can tell stories. Ishiguro
tells stories on {#blank#}5{#/blank#} level.
He places the reader in some
sort of alternative reality - which might be the future, it might be the
present, it might be the past. They feel like places that are whole and real, {#blank#}6{#/blank#} you don't know them.
They're weird and not necessarily happy places. But they're places that you can inhabit and relate to, and you become deeply involved with the characters. That's the writer's job—he just does it better than most.
