"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.