Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, joined the University of East Anglia’s MA in Creative Writing in 1979, graduating the following year.
In an anthology compiled for the 40th anniversary of UEA’s Creative Writing programme in 2011, Ishiguro wrote of his first weeks in Norfolk and on campus. “I had that autumn arrived with my one suitcase, a guitar and a portable Olivetti typewriter in Buxton, Norfolk – a small village with an old water mill and flat farm fields all around it. I’d come to this place because I’d been accepted on a one-year postgraduate Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia.”
Prof Jon Cook, who taught Mr Ishiguro when he was an MA student at UEA, reacted to the “fabulous news”. Prof Cook said: “His impact on English literature is the result of a remarkable imaginative synthesis of the styles and sensibilities of two cultures: the Japanese and the English. His work is informed by his experience of both cultures, even when he is not writing directly about their interaction.”
In this report, UEA Journalism students talk to the School about their most famous graduate.
