An Artist of the Floating World is set in an unnamed Japanese city during the period of reconstruction following Japan's surrender in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in World War II. He finds himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan's misguided foreign policy and is forced to confront the ideals of the modern times as represented by his grandson. Ishiguro said of his choice of time period, "I tend to be attracted to pre-war and postwar settings because I'm interested in this Business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren't quite what they thought they were before the test came."

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical Oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. His name in Japanese is written as 石黒 一雄. At the age of five, Ishiguro and his family (including his two sisters) left Japan and moved to Guildford, Surrey, as his father was invited for research at the National Institute of Oceanography. He did not return to visit Japan until 1989, nearly 30 years later, as a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term visitors Program. In an interview with Kenzaburō Ōe, Ishiguro stated that the Japanese settings of his first two novels were imaginary: "I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie ... In England I was all the time building up this picture in my head, an imaginary Japan."

He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school, he took a gap year and travelled through the United States and Canada, while writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies. In 1974, he began studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, graduating in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in English and Philosophy. After spending a year writing fiction, he resumed his studies at the University of East Anglia where he studied with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. His thesis became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982. He became a British citizen in 1983.

A number of his novels are set in the past. Never Let Me Go has science fiction qualities and a Futuristic tone; however, it is set in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus takes place in a very similar parallel world. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, takes place in an unnamed Central European city. The Remains of the Day is set in the large country house of an English lord in the period surrounding World War II.

Ishiguro has been married to Lorna MacDougall, a social worker, since 1986. They met at the West London Cyrenians homelessness charity in Notting Hill, where Ishiguro was working as a residential resettlement worker. The couple live in London with their daughter Naomi.

Ishiguro set his first two novels in Japan; however, in several interviews, he clarified that he has little familiarity with Japanese writing and that his works bear little resemblance to Japanese fiction. In an interview in 1989, when discussing his Japanese heritage and its influence on his upbringing, the author has stated, "I'm not entirely like English people because I've been brought up by Japanese parents in a Japanese-speaking home. My parents didn't realize that we were going to stay in this country for so long, they felt responsible for keeping me in touch with Japanese values. I do have a distinct background. I think differently, my perspectives are slightly different." When asked about his identity, the author says,

In a 1990 interview, he said, "If I wrote under a pseudonym and got somebody else to pose for my jacket photographs, I'm sure nobody would think of saying, 'This guy reminds me of that Japanese Writer.'" Although some Japanese Writers have had a distant influence on his writing—Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is the one he most frequently cites—Ishiguro has said that Japanese films, especially those of Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, have been a more significant influence.

Ishiguro has co-written several songs for the jazz singer Stacey Kent, with Saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, Kent's husband. Ishiguro has contributed lyrics to Kent's 2007 Grammy-nominated album Breakfast on the Morning Tram, including its title track, her 2011 album, Dreamer in Concert, her 2013 album The Changing Lights, and her 2017 album, I Know I Dream. Ishiguro also wrote the liner notes to Kent's 2003 album, In Love Again. Ishiguro first met Kent after he chose her recording of "They Can't Take That Away from Me" as one of his Desert Island Discs in 2002 and Kent subsequently asked him to write for her. Ishiguro has said of his lyric writing that "with an intimate, confiding, first-person song, the meaning must not be self-sufficient on the page. It has to be oblique, sometimes you have to read between the lines" and that this realisation has had an "enormous influence" on his fiction writing.

Ishiguro wrote in an opinion piece "that the UK is now very likely to cease to exist" as a result of the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.

In 2017, Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, because "in novels of great emotional force, [he] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world". In response to receiving the award, Ishiguro stated: