Kazuo Ishiguro: Social worker turned Nobel Prize Winner

– Drifted into writing –

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, but moved to England aged five, when his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography.

Intended as only a temporary move, the family eventually settled permanently in Guildford, a town some 30 miles (50 kilometres) southwest of London.

After finishing school in the area, he enrolled at the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he read English and Philosophy.

The author, who plays the piano and guitar, has said his first ambition was to become a rock star, but he drifted into writing instead.

“This sounds very blase…. but (writing) wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do,” he told the FT in the same 1995 interview.

– Grouse-beater at Balmoral –

Indeed, Ishiguro worked in several professions before settling on writing, including as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral and as a social worker in Glasgow and London.

His writing career finally launched during a creative break from social work.

Ishiguro had enrolled in an MA course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia where his potential was spotted by the publisher Faber, which signed him.

He began writing full-time in 1982, enjoying sustained critical and commercial success ever since.

The Nobel winner revealed on Thursday he is in discussions to continue harnessing his Japanese roots in a perhaps unexpected way: by writing a graphic novel.

“This is a new thing for me and reconnects me to my Japanese childhood of reading manga,” he said.