Kazuo Ishiguro: At the time when I was accepted in the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia, it was the only one in Britain that was an accredited master’s degree. And even at that university, it was not respected. The traditional English dons thought it was a ridiculous thing. It’s only because it was run by this very powerful and esteemed novelist and academic, Malcolm Bradbury, that it was allowed to run. And even then people didn’t apply for it. The year before I went, it didn’t run because nobody had applied, and the same the year after. So there’ll usually be — in my year, there were six, and I think it was the largest ever. And Ian McEwan was famous for having done that course ten years earlier. But beyond that, it wasn’t seen as a respectable way for serious literary British novelists to start a career. It was seen as a very strange idea.