Peter Francis Kornicki is the son of a Polish WWII Spitfire pilot and grew up in Malta, Aden, and Cyprus. He entered Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1968 to read Classics but transferred to studying Japanese after one year, taking a first class honours in Japanese with Korean in 1972. He received an MSc in Applied Social Studies, a DPhil in Japanese literature, and a DLitt, all from the University of Oxford, after which he taught at the University of Tasmania, Kyoto University, and the University of Cambridge. He was the President of the European Association of Japanese Studies from 1997 to 2000, a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000, and won the Yamagata Banto Prize in 2013.