The writers spoke to some Persian news agencies, commenting on the decision and Ishiguro on Thursday just hours after the academy announced the winner.

“The choice of this writer as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature is the academy’s response to its decision last year,” Soheil Somi told the Persian service of MNA.

Somi who has translated Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”, “The Unconsoled” and “The Buried Giant” added that the decision represents a change in the academy’s tendency to honor “the special writers.”

“The academy adopts certain policies every year to select a writer as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature, but if you ask me to choose between Kazuo Ishiguro and Philip Roth, perhaps I would tell you that Roth is more deserving of the prize,” Somi stated.

“However, my comment never undermines the great value of Ishiguro’s works,” he noted.

A Persian translation of “Never Let Me Go” by Mehdi Ghabrai has also been published by Ofoq.

“I don’t suppose that anyone was annoyed by this choice,” Ghabrai told the Persian service of ISNA.

He praised Ishiguro and said that he certainly deserved the prize and added, “I have read most of Ishiguro’s works translated into Persian and I like the version of ‘The Remains of the Day’ rendered by Najaf Daryabandari.”

Speaking to ISNA, Ahmad Puri, an Iranian translator of Russian literature, also expressed his happiness over Ishiguro’s win.

“Ishiguro is his due to receive the prize,” he said and added, “Bon appetite!”

“He enjoys an acute mind and is a matchless writer with great skills and I am happy about his win,” he noted.

Due to an opinion that traditionally views the Nobel peace prize decision as highly political, Puri said the academy seems to have made “blunders” at times, “but they seem set to break new ground.”

Puri also made a comment concerning those people who criticize the academy for selecting most of their winners from European writers.

“It should not be viewed as discrimination; it is natural if a society is culturally developed, there will be a rise in the number of its writers,” he noted.

Iranian poet Zia Movahhed who is also the author of numerous publications on philosophy said that the Swedish Academy make the decision to award a Nobel prize in literature under the influence of political and ideological issues.

“However, we should not voice any doubt about the winners’ expertise in literature,” he noted in an interview with the Persian service of ILNA.

He said that due to its political and ideological outlook, the academy ignored Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlu, who otherwise deserved a Nobel prize in literature.

Persian readers, Kazuo Ishiguro

All Ishiguro’s novels have been published in Persian. He was introduced to Persian readers for the first time in 1996 by Najaf Daryabandari who gave a translation of his “The Remains of the Day”.

In 1999, his “A Pale View of Hills” and “A Village After Dark” translated by Amir Amjad and Elham Purnazari respectively came out.

A Persian translation of “When We Were Orphans” by Mojdeh Daqiqi was published by Hermes in 2000. A new translation by Majid Gholami-Shahedi was released in 2016.

There are three Persian versions of “Never Let Me Go”.  Soheil Somi gave the first one in 2004. The second and third ones came in 2007 and 2016 by Mehdi Ghabrai and Fatemeh Amini respectively.

Somi also translated “The Unconsoled” in 2006.

In 2008, Khojasteh Keihan and Alireza Keivaninejad provided two translations of Ishiguro’s short story collection “Nocturnes”. Another translation of the collection was published by Ghabrai in 2014.

“An Artist of the Floating World” came to Iranian bookstores for the first time in 2012. Yasin Moahammadi is the translator of the book. Another translation by San’an Seddiqi was published in 2015.

Besides Somi, Farmeht Amirdoost and Amir-Mehdi Ahqiqat translated Ishiguro’s latest novel, “The Buried Giant”.

Photo: Ishiguro attends a press conference outside his London home on October 5, 2017 after winning the Nobel prize in literature. (AFP/Getty Images/Ben Stansall)

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With names including Margaret Atwood, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami leading the odds at the bookmakers, Ishiguro was a surprise choice. But his blue-chip literary credentials return the award to more familiar territory after last year’s controversial selection of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The author of novels including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro’s writing, said the Academy, is “marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place”.

Ishiguro’s fellow Booker winner Salman Rushdie – who is also regularly named as a potential Nobel laureate – was one of the first to congratulate him. “Many congratulations to my old friend Ish, whose work I’ve loved and admired ever since I first read A Pale View of Hills,” Rushdie said. “And he plays the guitar and writes sings too! Roll over Bob Dylan.”

Permanent secretary of the academy Sara Danius described Ishiguro’s writing as a mix of the works of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, “but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix, and then you stir, but not too much, and then you have his writings.

“He’s a writer of great integrity. He doesn’t look to the side, he’s developed an aesthetic universe all his own,” she said. Danius named her favourite of Ishiguro’s novels as The Buried Giant, but called The Remains of the Day “a true masterpiece [which] starts as a PG Wodehouse novel and ends as something Kafkaesque”.

“He is someone who is very interested in understanding the past, but he is not a Proustian writer, he is not out to redeem the past, he is exploring what you have to forget in order to survive in the first place as an individual or as a society,” she said, adding – in the wake of last year’s uproar – that she hoped the choice would “make the world happy”.

“That’s not for me to judge. We’ve just chosen what we think is an absolutely brilliant novelist,” she said.

Ishiguro’s publisher at Faber & Faber, Stephen Page, said the win was “absolutely extraordinary news”.

“He’s just an absolutely singular writer” said Page, who received news of Ishiguro’s win while waiting for a flight at Dublin airport. “He has an emotional force as well as an intellectual curiosity, that always finds enormous numbers of readers. His work is challenging at times, and stretching, but because of that emotional force, it so often resonates with readers. He’s a literary writer who is very widely read around the world.”

Born in Japan, Ishiguro’s family moved to the UK when he was five. He studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, going on to publish his first novel, A Pale View of the Hills, in 1982. He has been a full time writer ever since. According to the Academy, the themes of “memory, time and self-delusion” weave through his work, particularly in The Remains of the Day, which won Ishiguro the Booker prize in 1989 and was adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins as the “duty-obsessed” butler Stevens.

His more recent novels have taken a turn for the fantastical: Never Let Me Go is set in a dystopic version of England, while The Buried Giant, published two years ago, sees an elderly couple on a road trip through a strange and otherworldly English landscape. “This novel explores, in a moving manner, how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality,” said the Swedish Academy. Apart from his eight books, which include the short story collection Nocturnes, Ishiguro has written scripts for film and television.

Awarded since 1901, the 9m Swedish krona (£832,000) Nobel prize is for the writing of an author who, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s bequest, “shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Ishiguro becomes the 114th winner, following in the footsteps of writers including Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Mo Yan and Pablo Neruda.

The award is judged by the secretive members of the Swedish Academy, who last year plumped for the American musician Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. He proved an elusive winner and was described as “impolite and arrogant” by academy member Per Wastberg after initially failing to acknowledge the honour.

Some members of the literary community were also less than impressed: “This feels like the lamest Nobel win since they gave it to Obama for not being Bush,” said Hari Kunzru at the time. The choice of a writer who has won awards including the Man Booker prize should pour oil on at least some of the troubled waters ruffled by Dylan’s win.

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