Kazuo Ishiguro Reflects on Never Let Me Go, 20 Years Later: On the Decades-Long Creative Process Behind His Most Successful Novel (Kazuo Ishiguro, May 5, 2025, LitHub)
[I]n the late 1990s, I belatedly noticed I was no longer a “young writer”—that there was a distinct and exciting new generation emerging in Britain, typically fifteen or so years younger than me. Some of these authors I read and admired from a distance. Others became friends.
For instance: Alex Garland (who’d then recently published The Beach) and I began a pattern—still continuing today—of meeting for rambling, informal lunches in North London cafés, and I soon noticed how he, without self-consciousness or posturing, often cited writers like J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Wyndham. It was Alex who drew up for me a list of the most important graphic novels I had to read, introducing me to the work of important figures like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Alex was at that time writing a screenplay that would become the classic 2002 zombie dystopia film 28 Days Later. He showed me an early draft and I listened in fascination to him discussing the pros and cons of various ways forward.
And in the autumn of 2000, during a coast-to-coast U.S. book tour, my itinerary intersected three times with that of a young English author promoting his first novel. The novel was Ghostwritten and his name was David Mitchell—both at that point unknown to me. We found ourselves sitting in late-night lounges of hotels in the American Midwest, chilling after our respective events, competing to identify tunes the cocktail pianist was playing for us.
Alongside chat about Dickens and Dostoyevsky, I noted how he mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin, Rosemary Sutcliff, the recent Matrix movie, H.P. Lovecraft, schlocky old ghost and horror stories, fantasy literature. On returning home I read Ghostwritten and realized I’d been communing with a monster talent (an assessment that became more or less universal when he published Cloud Atlas three years later).
My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me. They opened windows for me I’d not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.
Interesting that PD James too produced a great dystopian novel later in life.