Nearly four decades have elapsed between my first meeting with British Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and my second, here in a suite at the Soho hotel, to discuss his new film, Living. Back in the Eighties, I was a student at the University of East Anglia and Ishiguro, one of the most famous graduates of its creative writing programme, gave a talk, after which I did a brief interview with him. My life hasn’t changed that much, really. Ishiguro, of course, went on to win the Booker Prize for his most successful book, 1989’s The Remains of the Day, followed by the Nobel prize for Literature in 2017, and to see several of his works turned into successful movies.
At 67 Ishiguro’s hair is greyer but he has the same, open, quizzical face and looks trim and fit in a sleek grey suit. “Actually I’m post-Covid: my wife and I both caught it at the Venice Film Festival last month and we’re struggling to get over it,” he says. He and Lorna MacDougall, a former social worker, married in 1986. Their daughter Naomi, 30 is also a UEA creative writing graduate with a collection of short stories and a novel to her name.
