One of 27 UK universities with nobel prize winning alumni. Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, and current President of the Royal Society Sir Paul Nurse graduated from UEA with a PhD in 1973.
Only 7 universities with nobel prize winning alumni are listed in the top 15 of every UK university league table:
Oxford
Cambridge
Imperial
LSE
UCL
St Andrews
UEA
Moreover UEA has more nobel prize winning alumni than Durham, Warwick, Exeter, Newcastle, York, Bath, Southampton, Cardiff, Lancaster, Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Royal Holloway, Reading, Loughborough and Leicester COMBINED!
One of 5 UK universities to have produced a current monarch (the King of Tonga graduated with a BA in Development Studies from UEA in 1980):
Oxford (Norway, Bhutan, Belgium, Jordan and Malaysia)
Cambridge (Denmark and Lesotho)
LSE (Denmark)
Bristol (Lesotho)
UEA (Tonga)
A world renowned Creative Writing programme which has produced 3 Booker Prize winners (Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Anne Enright) in addition to 11 Costa Book Award winners and 2 Caine Prize winners.
UEA has been ahead of the curve in terms of researching natural and anthropogenic climate change, having established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in 1971.
Alumni include one former Prime Minister of Tonga, one former Governor-General of Grenada, and 21 Cabinet Ministers from 17 nations, including 2 former UK Cabinet members, one Vice President, one Deputy Prime Minister, three Foreign Ministers, three Finance Ministers, and a Central Bank Governor.
A beautiful 362 acre interdisciplinary campus, which I found to be far preferable to non-campus based universities where the university community can seem fragmented and where the academic scene can be lacking in interdisciplinarity.