Woke culture gets abuse but it has many positives

Ahead of the release of his new film, Nobel and Booker Prizewinning writer Kazuo Ishiguro talks to Mick Curtis about the culture wars and why the housing crisis keeps him awake at night

- Kazuo Ishiguro

EARLY four decades have elapsed between my first meeting with British Japanese novelist Kazuo N 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.

Lorna invariably accompanies Ishiguro to film and literary festivals and she is the first reader and harshest critic of his work. She told him to rewrite his 2015 Arthurian fantasy The Buried Giant, which is why it took 10 years to finish rather than the usual three-tofive. The long gestation period of his books is nothing compared with the gap between screenplays, though.

Living, about a Fifties civil servant (Bill Nighy) reassessing his life in the light of a terminal illness and a platonic friendship with a young female colleague (Aimee Lou Wood), arrives a full 17 years after his last, for the near-forgotten film The White Countess. And Living, a remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film Ikiru, has arguably been fermenting in his mind even longer.