Hanif Kureishi

Kureishi was born on 5 December 1954^[1] in Bromley, South London to a Pakistani father, Rafiushan (Shanoo) Kureishi, and an English mother, Audrey Buss.^[2][3][4] His father was from a wealthy family based in Madras (now Chennai), whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947.^[5]

Rafiushan travelled to the UK in 1950^[6] to study law, but he ran out of money and needed to take a desk job at the Pakistani high commission instead.^[3][4] There he met his wife-to-be, Audrey Buss, "a young lower-middle-class suburban woman".^[7] He wanted to be a writer but his ambitions were frustrated, "eking out a life of permanent disappointment, writing novels on the kitchen table, but getting turned down."^[3][3] After the couple married, they settled in Bromley, where their son Hanif Kureishi was born.

In an interview, Kureishi notes:

My [paternal] grandfather, an army doctor, was a colonel in the British Indian Army. Big family. Servants. Tennis court. Cricket. Everything. My father went to the Cathedral School that Salman Rushdie went to. Later, in Pakistan, my family were close to the Bhuttos. My uncle Omar was a newspaper columnist and the manager of the Pakistan cricket team...My grandfather, the colonel, was terrifying. A hard-living, hard-drinking gambler. Womanising. Around him it was like The Godfather. They drank and they gossiped. The women would come and go.^[3]

Hanif Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School and studied for A-levels at Bromley College of Technology.^[8] While at this college, he was elected as student union president (1972). Some of the characters from his semi-autobiographical novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, are drawn from this period.^[9] He spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University, then withdrew.^[8] Later he attended King's College London^[1] and earned a degree in philosophy.^[8]

Kureishi started his career in the 1970s as a pornography writer,^[10][11] under the pseudonyms Antonia French^[12] and Karim.^[13] He went on to write plays for the Hampstead Theatre, Soho Poly, and by the age of 18, was with the Royal Court.^[3]

He wrote My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980s London for a film directed by Stephen Frears. The screenplay, especially the racial discrimination experienced, contained elements from Hanif's experiences as the only Pakistani student in his class at school.^{[citation needed]} It won the New York City Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He also wrote the screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987). His book The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel and was made into a BBC television series with a soundtrack by David Bowie. 1991 saw the release of the feature film titled London Kills Me, written and directed by Kureishi.^{[citation needed]}

His novel Intimacy (1998) revolved around the story of a man leaving his wife and two young sons after feeling physically and emotionally rejected by his wife. This created some controversy as Kureishi recently had left his own partner (the editor and producer Tracey Scoffield) and two young sons; it was assumed to be at least semi-autobiographical. In 2000/2001, the novel was adapted into the film Intimacy by Patrice Chéreau, which won two Bears at the Berlin Film Festival: a Golden Bear for Best Film and a Silver Bear for Best Actress (Kerry Fox). It was controversial for its explicit sex scenes. The book was translated into Persian by Niki Karimi in 2005.^{[citation needed]}

Kureishi's drama The Mother was adapted as a film by Roger Michell, which won a joint First Prize in the Director's Fortnight section at Cannes Film Festival. It showed a cross-generational relationship with a reversal of expected roles: a 70-year-old English grandmother (played by Anne Reid) seduces her daughter's boyfriend (played by Daniel Craig), a 30-year-old craftsman. Explicit sex scenes were shown in realistic drawings only, thus avoiding censorship. He wrote the 2006 screenplay Venus which starred Peter O'Toole.^{[citation needed]}

A novel titled Something to Tell You was published in 2008.^{[citation needed]}

His 1995 novel The Black Album, adapted for the theatre, was performed at the National Theatre in July and August 2009. In May 2011, he was awarded the second Asia House Literature Award on the closing night of the Asia House Literary Festival where he discussed his Collected Essays (Faber).^[14]

Kureishi has written non-fiction, including autobiography. As noted by Cathy Galvin in The Telegraph: "But at the core of his life, as described in his memoir My Ear at His Heart is Kureishi's relationship with his father, Rafiushan, who died in 1991."^[15]

Major influences on Kureishi's writing include P.G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth.^[3]

Kureishi, who is bisexual,^[16] lives in West London.^[3][8] His entry in Who's Who lists his recreations as "music, cricket, sitting in pubs".^[1]

He has twin boys from his relationship with film producer Tracey Scoffield^[17] and a younger son from another previous relationship.^[5] Although he acknowledges his father's Pakistani roots (originating in Madras, in British India, present-day Chennai, India), he rarely visits Pakistan. Upon a 2012 visit sponsored by the British Council, he acknowledged that it was his first trip to Pakistan in 20 years.^[18]

Kureishi's uncle was the writer, columnist and Pakistani cricket commentator and team manager Omar Kureishi.^[19] The poet Maki Kureishi was his aunt.^[20]

Kureishi's family have accused him of exploiting them with thinly disguised references in his work; Kureishi has denied the claims. His sister Yasmin has accused him of selling her family "down the line". She wrote, in a letter to The Guardian, that if her family's history had to become public, she would not stand by and let it be "fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif's profit".^[3][21] She says that his description of her family's working-class roots are fictitious. Their grandfather was not "cloth cap working class", their mother never worked in a shoe factory, and their father, she says, was not a bitter old man. Yasmin takes issue with her brother for his thinly-disguised autobiographical references in his first novel The Buddha of Suburbia, as well as for the image of his own past that he portrays in newspaper interviews. She wrote: "My father was angry when The Buddha of Suburbia came out as he felt that Hanif had robbed him of his dignity, and he didn't speak to Hanif for about a year."^[3] Kureishi and his father did not speak for many months during the controversy.^[3] There was further furore with the publication of Intimacy, as the story was assumed to be autobiographical.^[3][8]

In early 2013, Kureishi lost his life savings, intended to cover "the ups and downs of being a writer", in a suspected fraud.^[22] In October of that year, Kureishi was appointed as a professor in the creative writing department at Kingston University in London, where he was a writer in residence.^[2] However, at Bath Literature Festival in March 2014, he stated that creative writing courses were a "waste of time" and commented that 99.9% of his students were talentless.^{[23][better source needed]}

In 2014, the British Library announced that it would be acquiring the archive of Kureishi's documents spanning 40 years of his writing life. The body of work was to include diaries, notebooks and drafts.^[24]

On 26 December 2022, Kureishi was hospitalised following a fall in Rome, which left him with spinal injuries and unable to move his limbs.^[25] According to Kureishi, the fall triggered a near-death experience. He was convinced he was going to die while in hospital.^[26] Kureishi said that his partner, Isabella d'Amico, helped keep him calm and saved his life.^[27] He has since written about the fall and his recovery process on social media and in a blog.^[28] His detailed memoir including diary entries on the accident, Shattered, was published in 2024.^[29]

In September 2024, the BBC released a biographical documentary "In My Own Words" by his close friend Nigel Williams in which the writer revisits his life and career via the medium of old archive footage.^[30]

Kureishi was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours for services to Literature and Drama.^[31][32] In the same year, The Times included Kureishi in its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.^[33]

He has also won a number of literary awards, including:^{[citation needed]}

• 1980 Thames Television Playwright Award, The Mother Country
• 1981 George Devine Award, Outskirts
• 1986 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette
• 1986 Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette
• 1990 Whitbread First Novel Award, The Buddha of Suburbia
• 2007 National Short Story Competition, shortlist for "Weddings and Beheadings"
• 2010 PEN/Pinter Prize
• 2013 Outstanding Achievement in the Arts at The Asian Awards^[34]

• 1990 The Buddha of Suburbia, London: Faber and Faber
• 1995 The Black Album, London: Faber and Faber
• 1998 Intimacy, London: Faber and Faber
• 2001 Gabriel's Gift, London: Faber and Faber
• 2003 The Body, London: Faber and Faber
• 2008 Something to Tell You, London: Faber and Faber
• 2014 The Last Word, London: Faber and Faber
• 2017 The Nothing, London: Faber and Faber
• 2019 What Happened?, London: Faber and Faber

• 1997 Love in a Blue Time, London: Faber and Faber
• 1999 Midnight All Day, London: Faber and Faber
• 2019 "She Said, He Said", The New Yorker

• 2011 Collected Essays, Faber and Faber^[35][36]
• 2015 Love + Hate: Stories and Essays, Faber & Faber

• 1980 The King and Me, London: Faber and Faber
• 1981 Outskirts, London: Faber and Faber
• 1981 Borderline, London: Faber and Faber
• 1983 Birds of Passage, London: Faber and Faber
• 1988 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, London: Faber and Faber
• 1991 London Kills Me, London: Faber and Faber
• 1996 My Beautiful Laundrette and other writings, London: Faber and Faber
• 1997 My Son the Fanatic, London: Faber and Faber
• 1999 Hanif Kureishi Plays One, London: Faber and Faber
• 1999 Sleep with Me, London: Faber and Faber
• 2002 Collected Screenplays Volume I, London: Faber and Faber
• 2003 The Mother, London: Faber and Faber
• 2004 When The Night Begins, London: Faber and Faber
• 2007 Venus, London: Faber and Faber
• 2009 The Black Album (adapted from the novel), London: Faber and Faber

• 2002 Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics, London: Faber and Faber
• 2004 My Ear at His Heart, London: Faber and Faber
• 2005 The Word and the Bomb , London: Faber and Faber
• 2014 A Theft: My Con Man , London: Faber and Faber
• 2024 Shattered: A Memoir, London: Penguin

• 1995 The Faber Book of Pop. London: Faber and Faber

Kureishi's films include:^[37][38]

• 1985 My Beautiful Laundrette
• 1987 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
• 1991 London Kills Me (and director)
• 1993 The Buddha of Suburbia (television miniseries, based on the novel)
• 1997 My Son the Fanatic (based on his own short story of the same title)
• 1999 The Escort (with Michel Blanc)
• 2003 The God of Small Tales (short) (with Akram Khan)
• 2003 The Mother (adapted from the play)
• 2006 Venus
• 2007 Weddings and Beheadings (2007)
• 2013 Le Week-End

• 2001 Intimacy

• 2006 Souvenir

• Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Hanif Kureishi (Contemporary World Writers), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001
• Ranasinha, Ruvani, Hanif Kureishi (Writers and Their Work), Devon: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2002
• Thomas, Susie (ed), Hanif Kureishi (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism), Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
• Buchanan, Bradley, Hanif Kureishi (New British Fiction), Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
• Colin MacCabe and Hanif Kureishi, "Hanif Kureishi and London", AA Files, No. 49 (Spring 2003), pp. 40–49, published by: Architectural Association School of Architecture
• Kaleta, Kenneth C, Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller, University of Texas Press, 1998 ISBN 9780292743335

• Hanif Kureishi Archived 8 May 2023 at the Wayback Machine at the British Library
• Hanif Kureishi at British Council: Literature
• Waraich, Omar. When Bombs Speak Louder Than Words, Interview with Hanif Kureishi Archived 26 March 2011 at the Wayback Machine. The Daily Star, Beirut -International Herald Tribune Archived 20 September 2020 at the Wayback Machine 28 January 2006
• "In Conversation: Hanif Kureishi with Hirsh Sawhney". The Brooklyn Rail, July/Aug 2006
• Audio interview with Hanif Kureishi from OpenLearn, 12 January 2007
• Audio: Hanif Kureishi in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion show The Forum