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WORK TITLE: Shattered
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CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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LAST VOLUME: CANR 342
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PERSONAL
Surname is pronounced “koor-ee-shee”; born December 5, 1954, in Bromley, Kent, England; son of Rafiushan and Audrey Kureishi; married Tracey Scoffield (divorced); partner of Monique Proudlove; children: (with Scoffield) Sachin, Carlo, (with Proudlove) Kier.
EDUCATION:King’s College, London, B.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Film director, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and author. Writer in residence at Royal Court Theatre, London, England, 1981, 1985-86, and Kingston University, beginning 2009. Kingston University, London, England, professor of creative writing, 2014—. Worked in various capacities in the theater, including scene shifter, stage manager, usher, and box-office clerk.
AVOCATIONS:Jazz, cricket.
AWARDS:Thames Television Playwright Award, 1980, for The Mother Country; George Devine Award, Royal Court Theatre, 1981; Evening Standard Award, screen category, 1985; Rotterdam Festival Award, most popular film, New York Film Critics Circle Award, best screenplay, National Society of Film Critics Award, best screenplay, and Academy Award nomination, best original screenplay, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, all 1986, for My Beautiful Laundrette; Whitbread Prize, best first novel, Booksellers Association of Great Britain and Ireland, 1990, for The Buddha of Suburbia; Golden Bear Award, Berlin Film Festival, for film adaptation of Intimacy; decorated commander, Order of the British Empire, 2007; Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 2008; PEN/Pinter Prize, 2010; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
WRITINGS
Also author of the novella With Your Tongue down My Throat, published in Granta. Contributor of short stories and articles to periodicals, including New Statesman, Granta, Harper’s, London Review of Books, and Atlantic. Author appeared in a 2024 television documentary about his life entitled In My Own Words. Author of pornographic fiction under the pseudonym Antonia French.
The Buddha of Suburbia was adapted for a television miniseries, 1993; “My Son the Fanatic” was adapted for film, 1998; Intimacy was adapted for film, 2001; The Black Album was adapted as a play, 2009; The Buddha of Suburbia was adapted for the stage, 2024.
SIDELIGHTS
British writer Hanif Kureishi has made his mark in a number of genres, including plays, screenplays, and novels. He is perhaps best known for the scripts of the controversial films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but he also gained notice for his 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia, for his 1991 film London Kills Me, which he also directed, and for the short novel Intimacy, which he also turned into a film. Kureishi’s most popular works generally concern social issues, including racism, class differences, and sexual freedom. “I try to reflect the world as I see it,” Kureishi noted of his work to Irene Lacher in the Los Angeles Times. He added: “I’m not doing PR. Does Shakespeare present Hamlet as a nice Danish prince? A writer’s job, if we have any job in society, is to tell the truth as we see it, to write about the world as we observe it, and the world is a strange place and people are divided, unusual, wicked and good.”
Kureishi was born in Bromley, a suburb of London, England, in 1954. His father was a Pakistani immigrant, his mother English. Kureishi grew up with prejudice because of his background. He related in his autobiographical essay “The Rainbow Sign,” published in My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, that “from the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self” and that “it was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone else.” As an adolescent, Kureishi watched childhood friends join racist groups that beat and harassed Pakistani immigrants like those in his family. Such experiences stayed with him and inspired many of his adult works.
Early in life Kureishi decided to be a writer. He wrote novels as a teenager, some of which received serious consideration by publishing firms. At the University of London he majored in philosophy, and when he left school he returned to writing. For a time he supported himself by writing pornographic stories under the pseudonym Antonia French, and he began hanging around London’s theaters. From working as an usher in the Royal Court Theatre, he rose to become its writer in residence.
Plays and Screenplays
His first play, Soaking Up the Heat, was produced at the London venue Theatre Upstairs in 1976. Kureishi followed the work with The Mother Country, produced at Riverside Studios in 1980, which earned him the Thames Television Playwright Award.
Kureishi’s play Borderline addresses one of the themes that has since become a major factor in his more famous work. Borderline focuses on the problems of Asian immigrants living in London. In order to supplement the firsthand knowledge Kureishi had gained from his family, he interviewed Indians and Pakistanis living in the Southall section of London. Soon afterward Kureishi became successful enough to attract the attention of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which performed his play Outskirts. In 1984 he adapted a Bertolt Brecht play, Mother Courage, for that renowned theater group.
Meanwhile, some of Kureishi’s produced plays were published. One volume, Outskirts, The King and Me, [and] Tomorrow—Today!, received particular notice. Judy Meewezen offered a favorable assessment of the collection in British Book News, writing that “these pictures of urban tragedy, of those who exist on the outskirts of social, moral and material prosperity, are tense and fascinating.” Rowena Goldman, writing in Drama, described “The King and Me”—Kureishi’s short play about a woman consumed by her adoration of Elvis Presley—as “concerned not purely with a bored young mother’s obsession with her idol … but with the nature of obsession itself.”
In 1985 Kureishi went to visit his father’s relatives in Pakistan. While there he worked on what became the screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette. When he returned to England he began work with the film’s director, Stephen Frears. Originally commissioned by and for British television, the motion picture was made for approximately 900,000 dollars. The film is about Omar, a young man of Pakistani background, who, with the help of his entrepreneurial uncle, redecorates a laundromat to attract new business. He also hires Johnny, his white, punk, gay lover to assist him.
My Beautiful Laundrette attracted so much critical and popular praise that it was released in theaters in both England and the United States. Alan Brien revealed in New Statesman that he “was never prepared for the audacity, the sheer kick-in-the-guts shock, incorporated in such a contemporary tale.” “Subtract the fashionable elements of homosexuality, heroin-smuggling, violence and fantasy,” observed reviewer Ian Jack in the Times Literary Supplement, “and My Beautiful Laundrette could be an updated version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a film about a family’s response to an interracial relationship between a black man and a young white woman. Jack added: “Here at last is a story about immigrants which shows them neither as victims nor tradition-bound aliens. They’re comprehensible, modern people with an eye to the main chance, no better or worse than the rest of us.”
Though My Beautiful Laundrette was popular with general audiences, it offended some Pakistani groups in England and in the United States. These groups objected to Kureishi’s portrayal of some of his Pakistani characters as greedy and immoral, including drug dealers, gays, and promiscuous women. Groups protested showings of My Beautiful Laundrette, saying Kureishi’s film reinforced negative stereotypes of Asians and made prejudices against them seem justified. Kureishi responded to this kind of criticism—which has followed his subsequent works as well—in Interview, telling Ameena Meer: “It would destroy you as a writer if every time you wrote something you thought, is this a positive role model? I don’t see why Asian people or black people should be excluded from criticism because sometimes they have a bad time.”
Kureishi’s next film, again directed by Frears, was Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. The story of a racially mixed couple with an open marriage set against a backdrop of London race riots, the film did not fare as well with critics as My Beautiful Laundrette. In a review for Sight and Sound, Jill Forbes wrote that the motion picture “falls into the trap that lies in wait for farce,” and other reviewers commented that the film tries to explore too many issues simultaneously. Like My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid also spawned its share of controversy, this time because of its title. Because the Motion Picture Association of America refused to register the film under its full title on the grounds that it was salacious, U.S. newspapers ran advertisements for the film under the shortened name Sammy and Rosie.
In 1991 Kureishi made his debut as a director on a film that he also scripted, London Kills Me. Set in the Notting Hill area of London, the film centers on drug-dealing street gangs in general, and in particular on a young drug dealer named Clint. Like Kureishi’s other screenplays, London Kills Me was published in book form as well, this time in a volume that also features My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Reviewing London Kills Me: Three Screenplays and Four Essays for Library Journal, Anne Sharp mentioned that “few screenplay collections are as worthy of reading as this one.”
Novels
After finishing Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Kureishi took a few years off to work on his first published novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. Semi-autobiographical, the book describes a young half-Indian, half-English bisexual man growing up in a London suburb during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The title is derived from the character of the narrator’s father, an Indian immigrant who is sought after by his English neighbors to give them lectures on enlightenment via Eastern religions. Gilbert Adair, reviewing the novel in New Statesman, cited the novel’s “wonderfully vivid and vocal supporting cast of suburban social-climbers, forlorn Indian immigrants, theatrical poseurs and gamey leftist radicals.” But he, like other critics, noted that The Buddha of Suburbia reads too much “like an extended movie treatment.” Michiko Kakutani, however, reviewing the novel in the New York Times, observed that “Kureishi’s hilarious account … attests to both a manic sense of comedy and a shrewd sociological eye. … At the same time … [his] writing is tempered by a genuine affection for his characters, a sympathy for the dislocation they feel in response to the confusions of contemporary times.” The Buddha of Suburbia was awarded the Whitbread Prize for best first novel.
Kureishi’s second novel, The Black Album, is set in London in 1989 and takes as its central issue the death sentence handed down by Muslim religious leaders against writer Salman Rushdie because of his allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses. Kureishi juxtaposes these events with an exploration of the pop-cultural landscape in the late twentieth century. The title of the novel is borrowed from a controversial album by the musician Prince, an album that was withdrawn from sale after its release. The main character, Shahid, is a second-generation Pakistani living in London. While attending college he finds himself drawn in two different directions, noted Dave Haslam in the London Review of Books: “the sexy, liberal, Post-Modern world personified by his college lecturer Deedee Osgood, and the Islamic fundamentalist world of moral certainties represented by a sect based at the local mosque and led by Riaz,” a fellow student. Eventually, as Riaz organizes a book-burning of The Satanic Verses and Deedee is threatened because of her protests of the book burning, Shahid has to choose between his competing worlds and his two mentors.
Reviewers had mixed opinions of The Black Album. K. Anthony Appiah, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called the novel “a work of great ambition” and reported that “in the passages that impinge on the Rushdie affair, … the book is both compassionate and illuminating.” However, concluded Appiah, “though Mr. Kureishi has not lost his ear for the many dialects of modern British speech, his characters are schematic and, one feels, unloved even by their author.” Times Literary Supplement contributor Tom Shone was more critical of the novel, noting that Kureishi’s “writing has a habit of disintegrating at the slightest touch” and concluding that “this isn’t a novel at all, it’s a play with extended bits of scenery description.” Michelle Har Kim, writing in Nation, summed up the novel as “a tumultuous exploration of identity, belonging and responsibility … with uncritical discussion of race and superficial interrogation of Muslim fundamentalism.”
Kureishi’s novel Intimacy is an extended meditation on the end of a romantic relationship, narrated by Jay, who is preparing to leave his long-term partner and their two young sons. Jay ponders questions such as, “We must treat other people as if they are real. But are they?,” as he tries to come to terms with the fact that he is leaving the stable, reliable but no longer exciting Susan for a fascinating, adventurous but distinctly unreliable young woman named Nina. “If this were another, better novel, the question might seem rich with possibilities,” wrote New York Times reviewer Jane Mendelsohn. “But in the context of Intimacy it feels like pseudo-philosophizing or a cheap joke.” Los Angeles Times contributor Susie Linfield expressed a more positive view. “ Intimacy is not profound,” she said, “but Kureishi has created a sharp, nasty, compelling little novel.”
Kureishi’s novel The Body seemed to Library Journal reviewer Jim Coan to represent “a new direction for the English author.” Coan called the book “part Faust, part Twilight Zone,” a what-if tale about an aging and famous writer, Leo Raphael Adams, who has his brain transplanted onto a younger and more attractive body. After the successful operation, Leo runs to hedonism but also into trouble from a tycoon who wants his body for another transplant operation. Adams subsequently finds himself trapped inside this new body when he actually wants to resume his old life. Coan further described the novel as a “swiftly paced story of life in the fast lane veering dangerously out of control.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly found the short novel to be “at once intriguing and preposterous,” with writing that is “crisp and precise.” The same reviewer felt that The Body should please Kureishi fans “until something more substantial comes along.” Entertainment Weekly reviewer Jennifer Reese offered a different evaluation, noting that Kureishi “can do a lot better than this truncated, slapdash sci-fi meditation on beauty, aging, and death.” Whitney Scott, however, writing in Booklist, described the same work as “smoothly written, fast-moving, [and] thought-provoking.” Reviewing the novel in the New Yorker, John Updike felt that “as a parable, The Body has its telling moments.” Updike also noted that the book “has the terse speed and casual logic of a screenplay and might make a good movie.”
Many commentators considered Gabriel’s Gift, a novel about a teenage boy’s efforts to bring his estranged parents back together, an enjoyable but relatively minor effort from Kureishi. Gabriel, at age fifteen, lives in London and has dreams of becoming a filmmaker. His father, Rex, was once a member of a spectacularly successful rock band, but has fallen on harder times and refuses to take work that he feels will compromise his art. In exasperation, Gabriel’s mother, Christine, kicks Rex out of the house. While his mother and father are acting like adolescents, the young Gabriel is the one who takes positive action, finagling Rex a job teaching music to the son of a movie executive. By happy coincidence, this step leads to artistic success for Gabriel as well. Despite some comic setbacks, Rex and Christine eventually reunite. A writer for Kirkus Reviews described the novel as “thin but generally amusing,” while a contributor to Publishers Weekly called it “a shrewd, warmly imagined portrayal of the healing powers of art.” Writing in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Brian Budzynski described Gabriel’s Gift as a “genuine and … tender rendering of an ordinary family breaking to bits and calling on its youngest member to grow up too quickly in order to fix it.”
In the novel Something to Tell You, Kureishi explores the excesses and contradictions of contemporary life as seen by London psychoanalyst Jamal Khan. While Jamal’s patients are burdened by various fascinating doubts and neuroses, on which the therapist muses at length, Jamal himself has a guilty secret: decades earlier, he had been complicit in the murder of his girlfriend’s father, who had been sexually abusing the girl. Jamal has many rich and influential friends, including Henry, a highbrow theater director who has begun an affair with Jamal’s free spirited sister, Miriam. The single mother of five, Miriam is an obese lesbian who sports body piercings in numerous places and enjoys visiting London’s sex clubs, and her relationship with Henry causes Jamal no small amount of surprise. Other characters include Miriam’s various associates in the drug trade and even Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, who invites Jamal to a backstage party. This detail, says Kureishi, is based on fact; he really did meet Jagger once. Jamal’s guilty secret is also inspired by a real event. Kureishi once dated a girl who confided that her father abused her. She later ran away from home, and Kureishi never learned what had happened to her.
Reviewing Something to Tell You in the London Telegraph, Mick Brown described it as “a big book in every way: in size, scale and ambition.” The novel, continued Brown, “offers a powerful metaphor of the threat that fundamentalism offers to the cultural freedoms and values [Kureishi] cherishes.” Though fundamentalism “makes only a fleeting appearance in the book … Something to Tell You does address interesting questions about ‘too much freedom,’ not least in regard to the sexual libertarianism of the 1960s and its consequences.”
But Erica Wagner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, felt that “a certain staleness” and “a kind of terminal exhaustion” pervade the novel. Kureishi’s characters, wrote Wagner, “never become three-dimensional,” and even the novel’s depiction of life in London seem uninspired, as if they were “dragged off the Internet by someone who might never have visited the place.” Something to Tell You, the reviewer concluded, is a “dismal novel” that is unleavened by any “ironic distance” between Kureishi and his protagonist. Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Ed Wright made a similar point, criticizing the novel for flabby writing and for a protagonist who “comes across as glib” rather than insightful. London Independent contributor Boyd Tonkin, however, observed that the novel “throbs with unruly life.” The reviewer noted Kureishi’s “ceaseless crackle of wit” and skill in presenting “a dialectic between erotic energy (and the psychoanalyst that helps it speak) and the finished work of art.”
In 2014, Kureishi published the novel The Last Word. The book tells of two writers who exploit each other to further their careers. Young English writer Harry Johnson is asked to write an outlandish biography of the Indian-born British author Mamoon Azam and travels to the latter’s country home. Mamoon bears resemblances to famous real-life author V.S. Naipaul, and Harry to Naipaul’s biographer Patrick French.
“Around the diverting games of I-spy-Naipaul in The Last Word, the novel also contains deeper reflections on the businesses of writing, reading and biography, and their fate in what may be a post-literary culture,” wrote Mark Lawson in the London Guardian. Although the magnificent comic monster of Mamoon provides much of the book’s pleasure, it is finally as significant for what it is about as for whom it might concern.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor felt that “Kureishi aims to smash preconceptions about literary greatness but only lands glancing blows. Kureishi is smart about book culture and relationships in a novel that fails to satisfyingly merge both.” London Independent contributor Amanda Craig, on the other hand, concluded: “Far from being a roman-à-clef, The Last Word becomes a vehicle for Kureishi’s own persona—as all serious novels are. It is flawed by silliness about sex, but not by malice or the clod-hopping attentions of liberal lawyers. But the assertion at its heart, that a writer can be an artist, telling the truth, makes this book important as well as enjoyable.”
A wheelchair-bound, sex-obsessed filmmaker named Waldo is the narrator of Kureishi’s 2017 novel, The Nothing. Eddie, a friend, has been spending time at Waldo’s house hoping to gather information for possible biography of Waldo. However, Waldo is convinced Eddie has seduced his wife, Zee. Waldo makes plans to destroy Eddie’s reputation in hopes of winning Zee back.
Critics found The Nothing a difficult read. Writing on the London Observer Online, Sukhdev Sandhu suggested: “Death and dolefulness permeate every page, but so does a pleasingly lubricious impishness.” “Unfortunately … it all falls a little flat, bombastic theatrical style over substance only getting you so far,” commented Lucy Scholes on the London Independent Online. Referring to Kureishi, James Walton, a reviewer on the Spectator website, remarked: “Fortunately, the man can still turn a neat sentence, and The Nothing does have its share of nifty one-liners and good jokes. Nonetheless, in the end, possibly its most noteworthy achievement is to be so short, and yet still such a sprawling mess.” Allan Massie, a critic on the Scotsman Online, asserted: “Kureishi makes irritating demands of the reader. Writing in the first person he is on Waldo’s side. Usually it is hard not to feel sympathy for a first-person narrator. Not this time.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews writer stated: “It’s hard to love a character so sour, but a man with nothing to lose who’s turned resentment into an art form is hard to turn your eyes away from.” “There is not a decent soul or breath of fresh air within these pages,” wrote a contributor to Publishers Weekly.
Collections
Kureishi, whose passionate interest in popular culture is revealed in much of his work, edited a collection of nonfiction pieces about popular music called The Faber Book of Pop. Edited with Jon Savage, the book collects approximately 150 pieces about various singers, musicians, events, and musical forms from 1942 to 1995. While several reviewers praised portions of the book, others felt that the overall quality of the collection was uneven and the selection of the pieces notably biased. Both Liz Thomson in New Statesman and Dave Haslam in London Review of Books detected a “British bias” in the collection, and both criticized the absence of women, both as subjects and as writers. Concluded Thomson: “The best of [pop lore and literature] is rarely represented here. The Faber Book of Pop could be a guided tour through postwar history. Instead, it is a long ramble on a road without signposts.”
The short story collection Love in a Blue Time includes “My Son the Fanatic,” which was made into a successful film in 1998. The story centers on the conflict between an immigrant taxi driver, who values the ideals of assimilation and works hard to make his place in British society, and his indolent son, who finds meaning in the incendiary anti-Western rhetoric of a local Muslim leader. In Time Out London, John O’Connell observed that “it’s a shock to … realize just how accurately [Kureishi] predicted the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, bombs and all,” in this story and The Black Album. As Kureishi explains in an essay on “My Son the Fanatic” in his book Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics, he wrote the story as a response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Muslim leaders in Britain organized a rally in the northern city of Bradford where the book was publicly burned. Though the event drew considerable media attention, Kureishi felt that commentators were not paying enough attention to the lure of fundamentalist Islam for young Britons. “It perplexed me that young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of belief that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived,” he writes in Dreaming and Scheming. “Islam was a particularly firm way of saying ‘no’ to all sorts of things.”
Still, as Kureishi emphasized to Aida Edemariam in a Guardian interview, he does not see himself as any sort of spokesperson for Britain’s disaffected young Muslims. “People are always ringing me up and saying, do us a story on terrorism,” he said. “Give us a story about Bradford. … But I haven’t been to Bradford for ages. Just because I’m a Paki, it doesn’t meant I’m an expert on Bradford.”
[OPEN NEW]
At end of 2022, Kureishi was sitting on a couch in his girlfriend’s apartment, and he started feeling dizzy. He fell off the couch and somehow broke his neck, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. After lying in a hospital in Rome for a year, he was able to leave and move back to London. From there, he has overseen a stage adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia and written a new book, a memoir called Shattered. In it, he talks about his struggle to recover, of not being able to walk or even sit up, but he also ponders topics that he has considered much of his adult life: sex, writing, psychoanalysis, and his childhood, among others. Shattered also reflects on what Kureishi’s new life is like.
Writing in the Spectator, Lynn Barber was particularly taken with how the memoir is “passionately interested in other people,” including the people Kureishi met in the hospital and the people who care for him now that he cannot take care of himself. Barber concluded their review, “I’ve never felt tempted to use the word ‘inspirational’ about a book, and promise I never will again, but it’s the only word I can think of to describe Shattered.” Chris Power, in the New Statesman, had a much different reaction, calling the book a “devastating portrait of an imprisoned mind.” Power described the book’s central theme as agency—”the acceptance or otherwise of losing it.” He also acknowledged that the book is a bundle of contradictory emotions: “grim,” “optimistic,” “despairing,” “hopeful,” “embittered,” and “affirming.”
Dwight Garner, in the New York Times Book Review, focused on the remorse that Kureishi shows in the memoir, how he realizes how selfish and self-absorbed he had been earlier in life, and how he hopes to be a better man after the accident. Garner wrote that the book is “never boring” and that Kureishi “offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.” A contributor in Kirkus Reviews wrote, “Kureishi harrowingly reminds us that it takes just one fall to upend an entire lifetime, forever.”
[CLOSE NEW]
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Contemporary British Dramatists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1994.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 64, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991.
Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 194: British Novelists since 1960, Second Series, 1998, Volume 245: British and Irish Dramatists since World War II, Third Series, 2001.
Gay and Lesbian Literature, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Kureishi, Hanif, My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1986.
Kureishi, Hanif, Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics, Faber & Faber (London, England), 2002.
Parker, Peter, editor, A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.
Stringer, Jenny, editor, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.
World Literature and Its Times, Volume 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times: The Victorian Era to the Present, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.
PERIODICALS
Book, November 1, 2001, Kevin Greenberg, review of Gabriel’s Gift.
Booklist, March 1, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 1264; May 15, 1992, Benjamin Segedin, review of London Kills Me: Three Screenplays and Four Essays, p. 1656; September 1, 1995, Janet St. John, review of The Black Album, p. 40; November 1, 1997, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 454; January 1, 1999, Bonnie Johnston, review of Intimacy, p. 832; January 1, 2002, review of Intimacy, p. 904; February 1, 2004, Whitney Scott, review of The Body, p. 950; November 1, 1997, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 454; September 15, 2001, Ray Olson, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 192; April 15, 2008, Allison Block, review of Something to Tell You, p. 26; February 15, 2015, Mark Levine, review of The Last Word, p. 31.
Books, September, 1993, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 22; June, 1996, review of The Black Album, p. 24.
Books & Bookman, November, 1986, review of My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, p. 23.
Bookseller, August 30, 2002, “Previews,” p. 30; November 16, 2007, Benedicte Page, author interview, p. 24; March 7, 2008, review of Something to Tell You, p. 47.
British Book News, February, 1984, Judy Meewezen, review of Outskirts, The King and Me, [and] Tomorrow—Today! p. 115; May, 1986, review of My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, p. 314; December, 1987, review of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, p. 842.
Bulletin with Newsweek, February 11, 2003, Linda Jaivin, review of The Body, p. 75.
Callaloo, fall, 1999, Frederick Luis Aldama, review of Intimacy, p. 1097.
Canadian Literature, summer, 1992, W.H. New, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 194.
Connoisseur, May, 1990, John Powers, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 28.
Cosmopolitan, May, 1990, Louise Bernikow, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 56.
Drama, April, 1980, Rowena Goldman, review of Outskirts, The King and Me, [and] Tomorrow—Today!
Economist, July 15, 1995, review of The Faber Book of Pop, p. 67; June 13, 1998, review of Intimacy, p. 17.
Entertainment Weekly, November 21, 1997, Margot Mifflin, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 126; April 9, 1999, review of Intimacy, p. 71; February 20, 2004, Jennifer Reese, review of The Body, p. 69.
Esquire, August 1, 2008, Benjamin Alsup, review of Something to Tell You, p. 32.
Far Eastern Economic Review, April 4, 1996, review of The Black Album, p. 48.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 3, 1999, review of Intimacy, p. D14; Elisabeth Harvor, review of Something to Tell You, p. D11.
Guardian (London, England), March 1, 2008, Aida Edemariam, author interview; January 29, 2014, Mark Lawson, review of The Last Word.
Harper’s, February, 2000, review of Intimacy, p. 83.
Independent (London, England), March 14, 2008, Boyd Tonkin, review of Something to Tell You; February 2, 2009, Johann Hari, “Hanif Kureishi on the Couch”; February 9, 2014, Amanda Craig, review of The Last Word.
Interview, July, 1987, Amina Meer, author interview, p. 94.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 211; July 15, 1995, review of The Black Album, p. 974; September 1, 1997, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 1332; January 1, 1999, review of Intimacy, p. 10; September 15, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 1316; December 1, 2003, review of The Body, p. 1374; July 1, 2008, review of Something to Tell You; January 1, 2015, review of The Last Word; November 1, 2017, review of The Nothing; January 1, 2025, review of Shattered.
Lambda Book Report, July, 1991, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p 37; May, 1992, review of London Kills Me, p. 46; May, 1993, review of Outskirts, The King and Me, [and] Tomorrow—Today!, p. 48.
Library Journal, March 15, 1990, William Gargan, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 113; May 1, 1992, Anne Sharp, review of London Kills Me, p. 83; August, 1995, Doris Lynch, review of The Black Album, p. 117; October 1, 1997, Reba Leiding, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 128; December, 1998, Kay Hogan, review of Intimacy, p. 157; October 15, 2001, Marc Kloszewski, review of Intimacy [and] Midnight All Day: A Novel and Short Stories and Gabriel’s Gift, p. 108; January, 2004, Jim Coan, review of The Body, p. 157; April 15, 2008, Susanne Wells, review of Something to Tell You, p. 73; December 1, 2014, Sally Bissell, review of The Last Word, p. 92.
Listener, April 5, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 22.
London Review of Books, April 5, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 16; July 20, 1995, Dave Haslam, reviews of The Black Album and The Faber Book of Pop, p. 23; May 18, 2000, review of Midnight All Day, p 32; January 6, 2005, Eleanor Birne, review of My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father, p. 26; April 10, 2008, Nicholas Spice, review of Something to Tell You, p. 21.
Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1990, Irene Lacher, “No Fear He May Offend,” author interview, p. E1; April 22, 1999, Susie Linfield, review of Intimacy, p. 6; October 15, 2008, Charles Taylor, “Hanif Kureishi Weds Wit with His Middle-Aged Wisdom.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 18, 1986, review of My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, p. 9; June 3, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 3; May 19, 1991, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p 14; November 10, 1996, review of The Black Album, p. 15; October 14, 2001, Susan Salter Reynolds, review of Intimacy [and] Midnight All Day, p. 11; December 2, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 7.
Nation, July 9, 1990, Felix Jiminez, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 63; September 11, 1995, Michelle Har Kim, review of The Black Album, p. 245; April 19, 1999, Minna Proctor, “Buddha Leaves Suburbia,” p. 38.
National Post, April 10. 1999, Don Gillmor, review of Intimacy, p. 10.
New Republic, August 20, 1990, Ian Buruma, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, pp. 34-36.
New Statesman, February 21, 1986, Alan Brien, review of My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, p. 27; March 3, 1995, James Saynor, review of The Black Album, p. 40; May 12, 1995, Liz Thomson, review of The Faber Book of Pop, p. 37; March 5, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 52; August 13, 2001, Philip Kerr, “Too Close for Comfort,” p. 34; November 29, 2004, Mishra Pankaj, “Our Critics Choose Their Books of the Year,” 46; November 8, 2024, Chris Power, “Hanif Kureishi’s Interrupted Life,” review of Shattered.
New Statesman & Society, March 30, 1990, Gilbert Adair, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 34.
New York, March 15, 1999, Walter Kirn, “Diet Fiction,” p. 59.
New Yorker, August 21, 1995, review of The Black Album, p. 118; October 19, 2001, David Denby, “Unsheltered Lives,” p. 92; January 26, 2004, John Updike, “Mind/Body Problems,” review of The Body, p. 90; September 22, 2008, review of Something to Tell You, p. 91; May 25, 2015, Andrew Martin, review of The Last Word, p. 73.
New York Sun, August 20, 2008, Benjamin Lytal, review of Something to Tell You.
New York Times, May 15, 1990, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. B2; May 24, 1990, Glenn Collins, “Screen Writer Turns to the Novel to Tell of Race and Class in London”; July 14, 1991, Matt Wolf, “Hanif Kureishi Trades Pen for the Director’s Lens”; March 28, 1999, Jane Mendelsohn, “But Enough about You …,” section 7, p. 13.
New York Times Book Review, May 4, 1986, Michael Gorra, review of My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, p. 26; May 6, 1990, Clark Blaise, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 20; September 17, 1995, Kwame Anthony Appiah, review of The Black Album, p. 42; December 22, 1996, review of The Black Album, p. 20; November 9, 1997, Laura Miller, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 10; December 7, 1997, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 62; March 29, 1999, Jane Mendelsohn, review of Intimacy, p. 13; April 4, 1999, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 24; September 30, 2001, James Campbell, “A Little Bondage, a Little Discipline: Adulterous Sex is a Constant in Hanif Kureishi’s Fiction,” p. 7; December 29, 2002, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 16; February 29, 2004, Benjamin Kunkel, review of The Body, p. 5; August 22, 2008, Erica Wagner, review of Something to Tell You; February 2, 2025, “Hanif Kureishi,” author interview, p. 5; March 9, 2025, Dwight Garner, “Strong Motion,” review of Shattered, p. 9.
New Zealand Listener, June 7-13, 2008, Paula Morris, review of Something to Tell You.
Observer (London, England), August 17, 1986, review of My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, p. 23; April 8, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 58; June 24, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 50; May 26, 1991, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p 60; March 12, 1995, review of The Black Album, p. 18; May 14, 1995, review of The Faber Book of Pop, p. 16; March 17, 1996, review of The Black Album, p. 16; April 6, 1997, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 16; February 8, 1998, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 18; May 3, 1998, review of Intimacy, p. 18; January 10, 1999, review of Intimacy, p. 14; November 21, 1999, review of Midnight All Day, p. 15; September 3, 2000, review of Midnight All Day, p. 14; February 25, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 19; March 10, 2002, review of Dreaming and Scheming, p. 16; November 3, 2002, review of The Body, p. 16.
Paragraph, annual, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 24.
Poets & Writers, September-October, 2001, Frederick Luis Aldama, “The Pound and the Fury: A Postcolonial Conversation with Hanif Kureishi,” pp. 34-39.
Prairie Schooner, fall, 1990, Lee Lemon, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p 129.
Publishers Weekly, February 23, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 206; March 22, 1991, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p 78; July 10, 1995, review of The Black Album, p. 42; September 2, 1996, review of The Black Album, p. 122; September 8, 1997, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 55; December 14, 1998, review of Intimacy, p. 55; September 10, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 57; October 22, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 49; November 19, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 35; December 22, 2003, review of The Body, p. 34; August 11, 2008, review of Something to Tell You, p. 31; January 19, 2015, review of The Last Word, p. 54; November 6, 2017, review of The Nothing, p. 59.
Quill & Quire, June, 1996, review of The Faber Book of Pop, p. 41.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1997, Michael Reder, review of The Black Album, p. 189; June 22, 2002, Brian Budzynski, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 235.
San Francisco Review of Books, November, 1995, review of The Black Album, p. 24.
Sight & Sound, winter, 1987-88, Jill Forbes, review of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid November, 1996, review of My Beautiful Laundrette, p. 36.
Socialist Review, June, 2002, Hassan Mahamdallie, review of Dreaming and Scheming.
Spectator, May 12, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 38; March 11, 1995, David Horspool, review of The Black Album, p. 33; May 13, 1995, Michael Bywater, review of The Faber Book of Pop, p. 44; May 10, 1997, Ra Page, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 12; March 10, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 36; November 2, 2002, D.J. Taylor, review of The Body, p. 70; March 1, 2008, D.J. Taylor, review of Something to Tell You, p. 33; November 2, 2024, Lynn Barber, “A Great Way to Meet People,” review of Shattered, pp. 43+.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), September 21, 2001, Eric Hanson, “London Bridge; East Meets West in the World of English Writer Hanif Kureishi, and Pursuits of the Mind Are Never Far from Pleasures of the Flesh,” p. 27.
Sydney Morning Herald, April 25, 2008, Ed Wright, review of Something to Tell You.
Telegraph (London, England), March, 11, 2002, Sam Leith, review of Dreaming and Scheming; February 22, 2008, Mick Brown, “Hanif Kureishi: A Life Laid Bare”; February 8, 2014, Sameer Rahim, review of The Last Word.
Time, March 22, 1999, Elizabeth Gleick, review of Intimacy, p. 13.
Times Educational Supplement, April 18, 1986, review of My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, p. 26; May 4, 1990, Frances Spalding, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. C5; December 25, 1992, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p 20; April 7, 1995, Liz Heron, review of The Black Album, p. 15; June 2, 1995, Sinan Savaskan, review of The Faber Book of Pop, p. 14.
Times Literary Supplement, May 2, 1986, Ian Jack, review of My Beautiful Laundrette [and] The Rainbow Sign, p. 470; January 22, 1988, review of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, p. 87; March 30, 1990, Neil Berry, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 339; March 3, 1995, Tom Shone, review of The Black Album, p. 20; December 6, 1996, John Bowen, review of The Faber Book of Pop, p. 28; March 28, 1997, Sean O’Brien, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 20; May 1, 1998, review of Intimacy, p. 23; November 12, 1999, Phil Baker, review of Midnight All Day, p. 24; March 2, 2001, Nick Laird, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 22; November 8, 2002, Stephen Abell, review of The Body, p. 25; March 14, 2008, Tim Souster, review of Something to Tell You, p. 20.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 29, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 6; October 22, 1995, review of The Black Album, p. 5; February 23, 1997, review of The Black Album, p. 9.
Village Voice Literary Supplement, June, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 5; February, 1993, review of London Kills Me, p. 31.
Vogue, May, 1990, Quentin Crisp, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 180; March, 1999, Sarah Kerr, review of Intimacy, p. 312.
Wall Street Journal, May 8, 1990, Lee Lescaze, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. A22.
Washington Post Book World, May 27, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 7; May 5, 1991, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p 12; November 15, 1995, review of The Black Album, p. 8; March 14, 1999, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 10; October 21, 2001, Todd Pruzan, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 6, and review of Intimacy [and] Midnight All Day, p. 11; December 2, 2001, review of Gabriel’s Gift, p. 5.
Woman’s Journal, June, 1997, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 36; February, 1999, review of Intimacy, p. 15.
World and I, September, 1990, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 398.
World Literature Today, spring, 1991, Tariq Rahman, review of The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 370; autumn, 1992, Reed Way Dasenbrock, review of London Kills Me, p. 724; spring, 1996, Bruce King, review of The Black Album, p. 405; spring, 1998, Bruce King, review of Love in a Blue Time, p. 371; summer, 1999, review of Intimacy, p. 524; winter, 1999, review of My Son the Fanatic, p. 151; spring, 2001k, Bruce King, review of Midnight All Day, p. 332; May-August, 2005, Bruce King, review of My Ear at His Heart, p. 89.
ONLINE
Australia Broadcasting Corporation Website, http://www.abc.net.au/ (March 18, 2009), Ramona Koval, “Hanif Kureishi on Writing, Psychoanalysis and Relationships,” transcript of a previously broadcast television interview.
Bookbag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (March 18, 2009), Paul Curd, review of Something to Tell You.
BookLoons, http://www.bookloons.com/ (March 18, 2009), Michael Graves, review of Something to Tell You.
British Council Website, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/ (April 3, 2018), author profile.
British Library Website, https://www.bl.uk/ (April 3, 2018), author profile.
Emory University, Postcolonial Studies Website, http://www.emory.edu/ (April 26, 2002), author profile.
Fresh Air, https://www.npr.org/ (March 3, 2025), Terry Gross, author interview.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 22, 2018), article by author; April 17, 2024, Nadia Khomami, “‘Although I’m Tetraplegic, I’ve Started to Feel Normal.;”
Hanif Kureishi Website, http://hanifkureishi.co.uk (April 3, 2018).
Independent Online, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (May 10, 2017), Lucy Scholes, review of The Nothing.
Irish Examiner Online, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ (June 21, 2016), Marjorie Brennan, author interview.
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com (February 11, 2025), article by author.
NYC Movie Guru, http://www.nycmovieguru.com/ (March 18, 2009), author interview.
Observer Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 7, 2017), Sukhdev Sandhu, review of The Nothing.
Orange County Weekly Online, http://www.ocweekly.com/ (March 18, 2009), Bill Kohlhaase, review of Something to Tell You.
Royal Literary Fund, https://www.rlf.org.uk/ (October 23, 2024), article by author.
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (March 18, 2009), Charles Taylor, review of Love in a Blue Time.
Scotsman Online, https://www.scotsman.com/ (May 10, 2017), Allan Massie, review of The Nothing.
Spectator Online, https://www.spectator.co.uk/ (April 29, 2017), James Walton, review of The Nothing.
Time Out London, http://www.timeout.com/london/ (March 18, 2009), John O’Connell, “Sex and Books: London’s Most Erotic Writers.”*
Hanif Kureishi
UK flag (b.1954)
aka Antonia French
Awards: Whitbread (1990) see all
Genres: Literary Fiction
Novels
The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
The Black Album (1995)
Gabriel's Gift (2001)
The Mother (2003)
When the Night Begins (2004)
Something to Tell You (2008)
The Last Word (2014)
The Nothing (2017)
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Collections
Birds of Passage (1983)
Outskirts (1983)
My Beautiful Launderette ; The Rainbow Sign (1986)
Outskirts and Other Plays (1992)
Love in a Blue Time (1997)
Intimacy (1998)
T V: Collected Plays (1999)
Midnight All Day (1999)
Hanif Kureishi Plays (1999)
Intimacy and Midnight All Day (2001)
Collected Screenplays 1 (2002)
The Body (2002)
The Black Album with My Son the Fanatic (2009)
Collected Stories (2010)
What Happened? (2019)
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Novellas and Short Stories
My Beautiful Laundrette (1996)
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Series contributed to
Faber Stories
My Son the Fanatic (1998)
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Ox-Tales
Ox-Tales: Earth (2009) (with others)
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Plays hide
Borderline (1981)
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988)
London Kills Me (1991)
Sleep with Me (1999)
Venus (2007)
The Black Album - Adapted for the Stage (2010)
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Non fiction hide
The Faber Book of Pop (1995) (with Jon Savage)
Dreaming and Scheming (2002)
My Ear at His Heart (2004)
The Word and the Bomb (2005)
War With No End (2007) (with others)
Collected Essays (2011)
Theft: My Conman (2014)
Love Hate (2015)
Shattered (2024)
‘Although I’m tetraplegic, I’ve started to feel normal’: Hanif Kureishi on staging The Buddha of Suburbia
This article is more than 1 year old
As his coming-of-age rollercoaster hits the stage, the novelist talks about the boredom of hospitals, how Britain has changed since Buddha – and why shouting at his kids is a great way to write blogs
Nadia Khomami Arts and culture correspondent
Wed 17 Apr 2024 00.00 EDT
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It’s been an unfathomably difficult 18 months for Hanif Kureishi. In 2022, the esteemed British writer went to Rome with his wife for Christmas, where he fainted and fell. When he woke up in a pool of blood he had lost the use of his hands, arms and legs. For more than a year, he was confined to hospital beds, questioned and prodded by doctors and nurses. He couldn’t sit, he couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t pick up a pen to write.
So I’m struck by the optimism and humour of the man speaking to me over Zoom this morning. When I join the call, Kureishi is sitting erectly in his kitchen and joking with theatre director Emma Rice about their new stage adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, which opens at the RSC’s Swan theatre this week. It turns out the long months of convalescence – Kureishi has spent time in five hospitals, undergone spinal surgery, and only returned to his home last December – haven’t dampened his creative spirit.
The young people in Buddha never talk about money. They want fulfilling lives. But my kids and their friends talk about money all the time
“I’ve had a lot of time to think,” he says. “Particularly when I was in hospital and it was so boring. Hours and hours of the day would go by with literally nothing for me to do. I can’t use my hands. I can’t play with my phone. I can’t play music. I can’t send emails to people. I’m just sitting staring at the wall. But staring at the wall is a very good way of generating creativity.”
Kureishi now uses a motorised wheelchair and has a carer, meaning he has only made it to three rehearsals, yet the project has renewed his sense of purpose. “It’s really cheered me up that Emma is doing this play,” the 69-year-old says in his typically wry and concise manner. “It makes me very happy that my work is still alive after I nearly died. It also seems amazing that this book has survived for so long, that the story, the politics, the social background and culture are still of interest to people.”
‘It makes me very happy that my work is still alive after I nearly died’ … Kureishi, with his son Kier.
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‘It makes me very happy that my work is still alive after I nearly died’ … Kureishi, with his son Kier. Photograph: courtesy Hanif Kureishi
Published in 1990, Kureishi’s debut novel was a sensation, praised by readers for its relatability and by critics for its satirical humour and social commentary. The semi-autobiographical story follows Karim Amir, a mixed-race teenager desperate to escape Bromley for a more exciting life in a less suburban part of London. Over the course of five years, Karim navigates his relationships with friends and family – including his father, a comical guru-like figure who teaches his neighbours about Buddhist discipline – while experiencing a range of sexual and social awakenings.
“It’s rather like what The Catcher in the Rye was for young people in the US,” Kureishi muses. “There’s something about Karim’s voice, his naivety, his vulnerability, and the idea of this kid emerging from a suburban house into a world of ambition and politics and sexuality that is very seductive. Everyone can identify with it.”
It’s liberating to see so many new forms of sexuality. People are thinking and talking about gender
Karim faces hurdles in the book that mirror Kureishi’s own – like having to juggle two worlds and cultures, the Indian and English. Kureishi’s father came from a wealthy Indian background, moved to Pakistan after partition and then to London, where he met Kureishi’s English mother. Kureishi was the only child of colour in his school in the 1960s and endured racism and xenophobia. He was 14 when Enoch Powell made his “terrifying” rivers of blood speech.
In response, the youngster turned to books, music and fashion as a means of escape, which in turn equipped him with an ability to capture the cultural and social environment around him. For his efforts, Buddha won the Whitbread award for best first novel and was made into a BBC series soundtracked by fellow Bromley boy David Bowie. “There was one copy going round our school like contraband,” Zadie Smith once recalled.
“It’s one of the best modern stories there is,” says Rice, who was artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe from 2016 to 2018, before she founded the Wise Children theatre company. “It’s like a modern-day Hamlet. I read it when I was 23 and it blew my mind. It was like a bomb dropping culturally. It’s so funny, so political and so tender.”
‘After my first draft, Hanif told me I’d got it entirely wrong’ … director Emma Rice.
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‘After my first draft, Hanif told me I’d got it entirely wrong’ … director Emma Rice. Photograph: Steve Tanner (c) RSC
The pair’s collaboration should be distinctive. Kureishi, whose other notable works include the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette (earning him an Oscar nomination for the screenplay) and the 1998 novel Intimacy, which saw him described by the New York Times as a “postcolonial Philip Roth”. Meanwhile Rice, whose directorial credits include The Red Shoes and Wuthering Heights, has been called the “Wes Anderson of the theatre world” for her idiosyncrasies.
During our hour-long conversation, they discuss the difficulty and joy of trying to distill a novel into a theatre experience. “After my first draft, Hanif told me I’d got it entirely wrong,” Rice says. “He’s consistently said the story’s got to be political and funny.”
Rereading the book, I am struck by how relevant it still feels, despite ending on the brink of Thatcher’s victory. There are numerous parallels between today’s society and the Britain of the 1970s, when inflation was high, workers were striking, and people took to the streets in protest against a government that ignored them. Kureishi acknowledges this but is quick to highlight some major differences.
“Everyone’s much more pessimistic now,” he says. “I think people in the 70s really believed in the future and were quite optimistic about it, certainly with regards to music, fashion, the media and photography. Karim and his friend Charlie really believe they can make it, that they can be pop stars. But I don’t think my kids are optimistic like that about Britain and the future at all.”
Soundtracked by Bowie … Naveen Andrews, Roshan Seth and Susan Fleetwood in the 1993 BBC adaptation.
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Soundtracked by Bowie … Naveen Andrews, Roshan Seth and Susan Fleetwood in the 1993 BBC adaptation. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
The world, Kureishi says, “is more likely to make you crazy” now. “People are aware that the issues facing us are so overwhelming, like climate change.” He lists other problems to do with the lack of social mobility, the failure of the NHS and the lack of housebuilding. “One of the things you notice about the young people in Buddha is they never talk about money. They don’t want to be rich, they want to lead fulfilling lives. But that’s changed. My kids and their friends talk about money all the time.”
Though he calls the increased likelihood of a change in government “a shard of light”, he doubts “anybody is wildly optimistic about a Labour government”. The left, he says, “was much more active and coherent then. We don’t really have an organised left anymore.”
Rice also reflects on modern society’s sense of hopelessness. “I feel that we’ve been let down by everybody – by the church, by our politicians, by our TV presenters,” she says. “It’s hard to feel like anything we do at the moment can create change.”
What lights both Rice and Kureishi up, however, is the progress that’s been made in terms of identity and sexuality. When Buddha came out, it was still scandalous for Karim to want to “sleep with boys as well as girls”. “Now, it’s very liberating to see that there are so many new forms of sexuality; that the binary story just doesn’t provide enough opportunity,” Kureishi says. “It’s very creative and innovative. People are thinking and talking about gender, they’re exploring their own bodies and cultures.”
“Also, I don’t think people are pressured into having sex to the same extent that we were then, when it was considered to be almost revolutionary. When you think about what you do all day, you spend so little time actually having sex.” He smiles. “It only takes about five minutes.”
Writing gives me a sense of dignity – that I’m not just a broken body
“I feel very optimistic watching my stepkids grow up,” adds Rice, “not labelling themselves in the way we did.”
And what of racism today? As Kureishi has noted, there aren’t gangs of skinheads pushing excrement through people’s doors any more. But some discourse remains familiar – the government is still tying itself in knots over asylum-seekers and immigration figures. It’s something the writer has been reflecting on in hospital.
“I could see that the NHS is entirely run by immigrants,” he says. “Most of the nurses doing the all-night and weekend shifts – and all the care workers – are recently arrived immigrants. If you cut that off, then you’re going to have an ageing population that isn’t going to be taken care of.” He calls this “a real dilemma” at the heart of Britain. “You can’t fill those institutions with indigenous people. It doesn’t work, everybody knows that. And sending a few people to Rwanda isn’t going to address the problem.”
How will they be invoking all of this in a stage play? “The sound design is really key. We’re using archive political footage,” Rice says. “I’ve also used a construct to make a bridge between the 70s and now: Karim speaks into a mic a bit like the early standup comedians, really telling the audience where the conflict was.”
Kureishi before his fall.
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‘I’ve gone back to music now’ … Kureishi before his fall. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
But for Kureishi, sound – and music in particular – has been a source of pain recently. When he guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last year, he said he couldn’t bear to listen to music any more because “it would be too moving”. But with music being so interwoven into Karim’s story, did he find a way to cope? “I’ve gone back to music now,” he says gladly. “I just couldn’t listen to all the stuff I loved in that horrible, depressing atmosphere with nurses and doctors. But I’m back at home now, and I’ve got my kids, my friends and my world around me. I’m trying to resume my working life again.”
Kureishi has been working hard on physio and has gained some strength in his arms and legs, although he has been told by doctors that movement in the hands is the last thing to return. Still, he remains optimistic about his current situation. “Although I’m tetraplegic, I’ve started to feel like a normal person. Writing gives me a sense of self-esteem and dignity. That I’m not just a broken body. I still have health issues; every day is a lucky day for me. Working really keeps me believing in something worthwhile in my life.”
One of the things he’s working on is his forthcoming memoir Shattered, which is based on his writings on X and on his Substack, The Kureishi Chronicles. The posts began several days after the accident, when Kureishi was still in ICU and trying to make sense of what he calls his “Kafkaesque metamorphosis”. He began dictating his thoughts to his son Carlo, who duly transcribed them. Since then, the dispatches have attracted thousands of global subscribers – many of whom write to Kureishi about their own tragic experiences. His X following has quadrupled.
Just as he did when he was younger, Kureishi says he finds himself writing “to communicate with a wider world, with other people who will be sympathetic”.
‘There’s an immediacy to theatre’ … Deven Modha, Natasha Jayetileke and Tommy Belshaw as the rehearsals heat up.
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‘There’s an immediacy to theatre’ … Deven Modha, Natasha Jayetileke and Tommy Belshaw as the rehearsals heat up. Photograph: Steve Tanner (c) RSC
“I really needed to do the blog,” he continues. “It’s a new way of writing for me because I have to dictate it to a member of my family – one of my sons or my partner Isabella. My kids call me The Great Dictator because I shout at them and they write it down. It’s like a spontaneous bop chain of words. You kick off and off you go – you don’t know what you’re going to say, and you make sense of it by the end. I’ve started to really enjoy writing in this way. I write much quicker. The other day I wrote for two hours, dictating, and I did 3,000 words, which is a shitload for me.”
The Buddha of Suburbia follows on the tail of a stage adaptation of My Beautiful Laundrette, which was revived at Leicester’s Curve theatre. I wonder what makes theatre the right medium to tell these stories? “Buddha is a love letter to theatre,” Rice says. “That’s what drew me to it. And there’s an immediacy and a humanity to theatre. You’re going to feel close to an orgy, close to a racist beating. You’ll feel the heat coming off the actors when they dance. Unlike TV, theatre also brings imagination and suggestion – the audience can go anywhere.”
“Writing, theatre, acting and music are really what we’re good at in this country,” concludes Kureishi. “That’s our reason to be optimistic.”
The Buddha of Suburbia is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 18 April to 1 June
A fall 'Shattered' Hanif Kureishi's life. Dictating his new book gave him purpose
March 3, 20251:21 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
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Terry Gross
43-Minute Listen
Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi says his fall in 2022 didn't rob him of his ability to function or be creative: "In fact, I'm writing more now."
Kier Kureishi/Harper Collins
Novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi remembers only bits and pieces of the day in 2022 when his life changed forever. He recalls being sick with a stomach infection and starting to feel faint — and then his memory gets fuzzy. Looking back, Kureishi says, he likely stood up to walk, and then fell flat on his face, breaking his neck.
"When I woke up, I was in a pool of blood," Kureishi says. "And then I saw these objects out of the corner of my eye, and I didn't know what they were. And then I began to realize that it was my hands. But I had no agency over them."
Kureishi could speak, but he was unable to move his hands or other parts of his body. He spent a year in hospitals before he was able to return home, where he is assisted by round-the-clock caregivers.
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Shattered, by Hanif Kureishi
Harper Collins
"At the beginning, there was a lot of anger," he says. "When you have ... your ordinary life snatched away from you by an illness — as will happen to so many of us — you are absolutely furious. And you become furious with the people around you. You become furious with your life."
The son of a British mother and a father who emigrated from Pakistan in the late 1940s, Kureishi was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of the 1985 film My Beautiful Launderette. He went on to more films and books, including the 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia.
Kureishi started writing his new memoir, Shattered, just days after the accident by dictating to his partner, Isabella, and his son, Carlo. In it, he describes being completely dependent on others, feeling helpless and humiliated.
But he says writing about his condition also gave him purpose: "Even though I was really ill and really bombed out of my head on painkillers and so on, I was writing a blog every single day about my condition, and it was very exciting that people were interested in what I had to say and what had happened to me."
Interview Highlights
On his current mobility
I can't use my fingers, I can't grip, I couldn't pick up a pen or anything like that. I can move my shoulder. I can move my legs a bit. Obviously I'm in a wheelchair. I can't stand up, but I can't actually use my hands. So I'm around-the-clock dependent, but I'm stronger than I was and I have physio [therapy] every day and so on. … I move a bit, but I think this is pretty much where I'm gonna remain from now on.
Man Who Is Paralyzed Communicates By Imagining Handwriting
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Man Who Is Paralyzed Communicates By Imagining Handwriting
On the randomness of the fall that left him paralyzed
When I was in hospital in north London, in the rehab … everybody on the ward has had an accident. One guy had dived into an empty swimming pool by mistake. Another guy had fallen down the stairs while drinking a glass of wine. Another guy had fallen over his rake and his garden, just tripped over it and fell down and broke his neck and was paralyzed. So we all had these random, rather contingent accidents, but suddenly, in a moment, completely changed your life forever, and there's no going back.
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That is absolutely enraging. You think why couldn't I have been doing something else at that moment? Why didn't that moment occur to me? Why have I been chosen? What have I done wrong? You go through all these terrible, awful thoughts about who has done this to you and why it's happened, and it makes you an angry person. So I think there are moments, quite rightly, where you deserve to feel angry, but it's tough on the people around you.
On how being able to work helps his relationship with his partner and with himself
Most of the people that I was in hospital with, they can't go back to work. None of them are going back to work. If you're a truck driver, or you're a street cleaner, or your postman, or whatever, none of those men or women can go back to work. And so they go back home and they lie in bed and they watch TV. My job, thankfully, is a talking and writing job, and I work every day. And that's part of the important part of our relationship. She works and I work, and I have the dignity of my work.
I haven't been robbed of my ability to function, to be creative.
Hanif Kureishi
I've written Shattered, I'm writing other stuff and I feel that is my part of the relationship, that I earn money, that I support us. I'm a father to my son, so I'm still doing stuff in the world and I have some dignity. I haven't been robbed of my ability to function, to be creative. In fact, I'm writing more now, even though I'm disabled, than I did before. And I'm very happy to work. And I go to work in the morning with great energy and belief. And that's important in our relationship for both of us. So we both feel that we are dignified, creative people doing stuff that matters in the world.
On his relationship to sex and intimacy since the accident
You do feel released from some terrible agency, and you look with amusement on other people's bizarre activities, actually. So I don't particularly miss it. I don't particularly care about it because there really are other forms of human intercourse, other forms of human love, other forms of touching and kissing and being with somebody else in a sensual way. I think probably it's a real narrowing of the sexual spectrum, to think that there are only a few ways in which you can be sexual. I think sexuality and sensuality is a much broader thing than we grow up thinking, to be honest. So you can find other ways of loving other people that are not necessarily sexual in the most overt sense, actually.
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On not reading his friend Salman Rushdie's memoir, Knife, about the attack that almost killed him and his recovery
Two nights before the attack, Salman Rushdie dreamed he was stabbed onstage
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Two nights before the attack, Salman Rushdie dreamed he was stabbed onstage
The reason I didn't read it wasn't because I wanted to keep to my own thoughts. ... I didn't want to hear about his suffering. ... I've known Salman since the early '80s and I love him, admire him as a man and as a writer. He's like an older brother to me. And there was no way I was going to read about that awful thing that happened. I just couldn't face it. And he understands that. He's aware of that. And I didn't want to read about someone being in hospital and having to recover and so on. I can write about it, but I don't want to hear about it because my life is miserable enough as it is. I don't want to make it worse.
On what's next
In 'Monsters,' Graphic Novelist Emil Ferris Embraces The Darkness Within
Author Interviews
In 'Monsters,' Graphic Novelist Emil Ferris Embraces The Darkness Within
I want to have a lot going on. I'm doing a dance thing. I'm writing another book. I'm doing this movie with Luca Guadagnino. I'm very excited about what I'm doing, and I need to get up in the morning and look forward to the day and think, what am I going to do today? Is it going to be exciting? Am I going to see a really good friend? Am I going to have a conversation that I never had before? And I'm going to work on something that's fresh and new? I'm really excited about my book Shattered coming out in the U.S., for instance. I haven't published a book in the U.S. for a long time. So I want to read the reviews. I want to read the interviews. I want to find out how the book's doing. I just want to be excited about the world after having gone through a year of hell.
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My Writing Life: Hanif Kureishi
Author Hanif Kureishi
23 October, 2024Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is the author of nine novels, including The Buddha of Suburbia (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel), The Black Album, Intimacy and The Nothing. His screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar, he is the recipient of the PEN/Pinter Prize, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He writes The Kureishi Chronicles on Substack.
The RSC’s adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia is playing now at The Barbican, and runs until 16 November. Hanif Kureishi’s memoir Shattered – which details the accident that left him paralysed, and its aftermath – will be published by Penguin on 31 October.
What book should every writer read?
I wouldn’t like to nominate any particular book, but only emphasise, that for young writers, one of the most important things is that they read and read and read. It doesn’t matter so much what it is, but that they are embedding in their creative soul the nature of what a story might be, and what the possibilities of writing are, which they might explore themselves later in their own writing.
What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your writing career?
I always knew that for someone from my background to become a professional writer would require a lot of hard work and self-belief, but I wasn’t aware that along the way – in theatre and cinema particularly – that it would be such fun. Nobody warned me, but I have to say I enjoyed it all along the way.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?
That it is a discipline, a practise, which you get on with every day for the rest of your life.
What is the most underestimated challenge about being a professional writer?
How difficult it is to make a living.
What was the proudest moment of your writing career?
Receiving the first finished copy of my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia.
What is your typical writing day like?
I start work at ten in the morning with my son Carlo and work until 12:30. The rest of the day I piss about.
Hanif Kureishi had a serious accident on Boxing Day 2023 where he received a spinal cord injury which has meant that he can no longer walk or use his hands. He requires round-the-clock care as well as physiotherapy, hydrotherapy and equipment, which will enable him to maintain his fitness such as it is.
If you would like to contribute to his upkeep and welfare so that he can continue to function as a writer, please do so at hanifkureishi.org.
This interview originally appeared on our Substack.
After the Fall: Hanif Kureishi on Trauma, Recovery and What It Means to Be a Writer
“I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.”
By Hanif Kureishi
February 11, 2025
On Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall.
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Sitting at a table in Isabella’s living room with my iPad in front of me, I had just seen Mo Salah score against Aston Villa. I was sipping a beer when I began to feel dizzy. I leant forward and put my head between my legs; I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, Isabella on her knees beside me.
I then experienced what can only be described as a scooped, semicircular object with talons scuttling towards me. Using what was left of my reason, I saw this was one of my hands, an uncanny thing over which I had no agency.
It occurred to me that there was no coordination between my mind and what remained of my body. I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying, that I had three breaths left. It seemed like a miserable and ignoble way to go.
In this somewhat desolate Roman hospital, in a suburb of Rome, I am writing these words to try to reach someone.
People say when you’re about to die your life passes before your eyes, but for me it wasn’t the past but the future that I thought about—everything I was being robbed of, all the things I wanted to do.
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*
Isabella and I live in London but we were staying in her apartment in Rome for Christmas, and it was there that I had my fall, sitting at the large round table, covered in books and papers, where she and I work together in the mornings.
From the bathroom, she heard my frantic shout, came in and called an ambulance. She saved my life and kept me calm, crouching down beside me. I told her I wanted to FaceTime my three sons and say goodbye, but Isabella said it wasn’t a good idea, it would frighten and appall them.
For a few days I was profoundly traumatized, altered and unrecognizable to myself.
Now I am in the Gemelli Hospital, Rome. I cannot move my arms and legs. I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself. As you can imagine, this is both humiliating and degrading, making me a burden for others. According to my hospital report, my fall resulted in neck hyperextension and immediate tetraplegia. An MRI scan showed a severe stenosis of the vertebral canal with signs of spinal cord injury from C3 to C5. In layman’s terms, the vertebrae at the top of my spine suffered a kind of whiplash. I’ve had an operation on my neck to relieve compression on my spine where the injury is, and have shown minor motor improvements.
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I have sensation and some movement in all my limbs, I did not have what they call a ‘complete break.’ I will begin physio and rehabilitation as soon as possible.
At the moment, it is unclear whether I will be able to walk again, or if I’ll ever be able to hold a pen. I am speaking these words through Isabella, who is slowly typing them into her iPad. I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.
*
I wasn’t a happy child but I wasn’t an unhappy one either. Once I could read I was free. I could go to libraries every day, often accompanied by my mother, and I saw that books were a way out of my immediate surroundings.
Soon I learned to cycle. Alone, I could explore the streets and fields of the countrified semi-suburbs in which I grew up. It was a county called Kent, which had been bombed to hell not long before I was born.
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In those days parents were less policelike. They gave you a penny at the beginning of the day and didn’t expect to see you until the evening. I cycled all day, stopped where I wanted and talked to anyone who had a story for me. I am still like that.
The third element in my liberation was the discovery of my father’s typing manual. My father himself had been a journalist and was writing fiction. His vigorous typing in his sexy shirtsleeves seemed impressive.
One day he bought a little portable typewriter in a blue case of which he was incredibly proud. He swung it round and round, because it was light, and suddenly announced he was going to Vietnam to be a war correspondent like Hemingway or Norman Mailer.
I started to blindfold myself with my school tie and found I could type the correct words in order without looking.
It was exhilarating. I had been reading Crime and Punishment at the time, always a cheery go to book for a young man, and as practice I began to copy out pages from this great novel.
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At school I had been a disaster, but at last I had found something I could do. I never had the desire to write underwater stories, adventure stories or amazing tales involving giants, dwarfs, elves or mermaids.
I didn’t know much about those things, but I did know the people around me. And I guess that made me into something of a realist. One day, looking out of the window at school, I called myself a writer.
I found the title suited me like a good shirt. I was keen for others to apply the word to me even though I hadn’t yet written anything.
After all, at school many words had already been applied to me, words like ‘Brownie, ’ or ‘Paki,’ or ‘Shitface,’ so I found my own word, I stuck to it, and never let it go. It is still my word.
Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.
The last time a medical digit entered my backside was a few years ago. As the nurse flipped me over she asked, “How long did it take you to write Midnight’s Children?” I replied, “If I had indeed written that, don’t you think I would have gone private?”
*
Before my accident, when I woke up in the morning, the first thing I would do is make my coffee and go upstairs to my desk, which overlooks the street. Around the edge of the desk, in various pots and old coffee cups, I have dozens of fountain pens, pencils, markers; I also have many bottles of ink, in numerous colors, from the ludicrous to the sober.
I would pick up a pen and make a mark on a page of good thick paper, then make another mark, write a word, a sentence and another sentence, until I felt something waking up inside me. The writing zigzagged across the page in multicolors, as though there had been an accident in a schoolroom.
As I made these marks, I began to hear characters speaking; if I was lucky they might start talking to each other, or even amusing one another. I would feel excited and that my life had meaning at last.
I’m sure painters, architects and gardeners love their tools, and see them as an extension of their body. I hope one day I will be able to go back to using my own precious and beloved instruments.
Excuse me, I’m being injected in my belly with something called Heparina, a blood thinner.
I find that writing by hand, moving my wrist across the page—the feeling of skin on paper—is more like drawing than typing. I wouldn’t want to write directly into a machine, it’s too formal.
Out of these unexpected breaks, there must be new opportunities for creativity.
After a while, one word will push out another word, followed by another word, and more words and sentences may follow. I sit at my desk in my swirly Paul Smith pajamas, and after an hour something I can use may have emerged.
When I read it through, something usually attracts my attention, which I can develop. I guess this method is now known as free writing or free association. You start with nothing and after some time you find yourself in a new place.
My hands continue to feel like alien objects. They’re swollen, I cannot open or close them, and when they are under the sheets, I could not tell you where they are precisely. They may in fact be in another building altogether, having a drink with friends.
I have been moved from the ICU to a small grim side room. There is a picture of the Virgin Mary ahead of me, and the view outside the window, which I cannot see myself, is of a car park, motorway, and Roman pine trees, which look like parasols. I tell Isabella the place hasn’t been decorated since Hemingway left.
I was low yesterday. Trying to dictate these words to Isabella, I became impatient with the slowness of the process. She is Italian and English is her second language, so she doesn’t always get what I say.
Carlo Kureishi, the second of my twin sons, has now flown out to Italy, and is helping me with this dictation. He is in his late twenties and, like me, read philosophy at university. He enjoys movies and sport and is starting to make his way as a screenwriter. What I like about him is that he can type quickly. Normally, of course, I can write this stuff up myself. I can even spell.
Isabella and I have started to argue. She is in the hospital with me all day, and is looking tired and thin, as she would in the circumstance of this terrible strain. When she turned to me and asked, “Would you have ever done this for me?” I couldn’t answer. I don’t know.
Our relationship has taken a new turn, not one we could have anticipated, and we will have to find a new way of loving each other. At the moment, I have no idea how to do this.
A few months ago, Apple Music, on behalf of the Beatles, asked me to write an introduction to their book Get Back, to coincide with the release of Peter Jackson’s Beatles series on Disney. For a long time I was stumped. What more could there be to say about the Beatles?
And then it occurred to me that those four boys, with their numerous collaborators, were able to do things together that they couldn’t do apart. This is both a miracle and a terrible dependency. In my experience, all artists are collaborationists.
If you are not collaborating with a particular individual, you are collaborating with the history of the medium, and you’re also collaborating with the time, politics and culture within which you exist. There are no individuals.
In this somewhat desolate Roman hospital, in a suburb of Rome, I am writing these words to try to reach someone, and I am, at the same time, attempting to connect with Isabella, to make a new relationship out of an old one. You’d think I’d have enough on my plate.
I wish what had happened to me had never happened, but there isn’t a family on the planet that will evade catastrophe or disaster. But out of these unexpected breaks, there must be new opportunities for creativity.
If you were with me tonight, my reader, we would each pour a large vodka with a juicy mixer and drink and embrace each other with a little hope.
Hanif Kureishi
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the British playwright and screenwriter. For the Indian street art artist and designer, see Hanif Kureshi.
Hanif Kureishi
CBE
Kureishi in 2008
Kureishi in 2008
Born 5 December 1954 (age 70)
Bromley, Kent, England
Occupation Playwright, screenwriter, novelist, film director
Education Bromley College of Technology
Alma mater King's College London
Period 1976–present
Literary movement Postcolonial literature
Notable works My Beautiful Laundrette
The Buddha of Suburbia
Children 3
Signature
Hanif Kureishi CBE (born 5 December 1954) is a British Pakistani playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, and novelist. He is known for his film My Beautiful Laundrette and novel The Buddha of Suburbia.
Early life and education
Hanif 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's father was a colonel and doctor in the British Indian Army. Rafiushan went to the same Cathedral School attended by Salman Rushdie, and the family was later close to the Bhuttos. Rafiushan's brother (Hanif's uncle), Omar Kureishi, was a newspaper columnist and manager of the Pakistan cricket team.[3]
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.[7] He wanted to be a writer but his ambitions were frustrated, with his submissions to publishers turned down.[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] He later attended King's College London[1] and earned a degree in philosophy.[8]
Career
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 Kureishi'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. [citation needed] He also wrote the screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987).[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
In 1991 his feature film titled London Kills Me, which he wrote and directed, was released.[citation needed]
Kureishi's 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 awards at the Berlin Film Festival.[citation needed] 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, released in 2003. It tells the story of a cross-generational relationship with a reversal of expected roles: a 70-year-old English grandmother seduces her daughter's boyfriend.[citation needed]
Kureishi wrote the 2006 screenplay Venus, for the film starring 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.[citation needed]
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 also written non-fiction, including an autobiography, My Ear at His Heart. In it, he describes his relationship with his father, Rafiushan, who died in 1991.[15]
Major influences on Kureishi's writing include P.G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth.[3]
Other activities
In October 2013, Kureishi was appointed as a professor in the creative writing department at Kingston University in London, where he was a writer in residence.[2]
Personal life
Kureishi was living in West London in 2016.[3][8] His entry in Who's Who lists his recreations as "music, cricket, sitting in pubs".[1]
Although he acknowledges his father's Pakistani roots, Kureishi rarely visits Pakistan. A 2012 visit sponsored by the British Council was his first trip to Pakistan in 20 years.[16] Kureishi's uncle was the writer, columnist and Pakistani cricket commentator and team manager Omar Kureishi.[17] The poet Maki Kureishi was his aunt.[18]
He is bisexual.[19] He has twin boys from his relationship with film producer Tracey Scoffield[20] and a younger son from a previous relationship.[5]
Kureishi's family have accused him of exploiting them with thinly disguised references in his work, with his sister Yasmin writing a letter to The Guardian about it.[3][21] She says that his descriptions of her family's working-class roots are fictitious, and their father 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. Hanif's father felt that Hanif had robbed him of his dignity in The Buddha of Suburbia, and didn't speak to him for many months.[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 in a suspected fraud.[22]
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.[23]
On 26 December 2022, Kureishi was hospitalised following a fall in Rome, which left him with spinal injuries and unable to move his limbs.[24] According to Kureishi, the fall triggered a near-death experience. He was convinced he was going to die while in hospital,[25] later saying that his partner, Isabella d'Amico, helped keep him calm and saved his life.[26] He has since written about the fall and his recovery process on social media and in a blog.[27] His detailed memoir, including diary entries on the accident, Shattered, was published in 2024.[28]
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.[29]
Recognition, awards and honours
Kureishi was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours for services to Literature and Drama.[30][31] In the same year, The Times included Kureishi in its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.[32] He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.[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 Nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette
1987 Nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original 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]
Written works
Novels
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
Story collections
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
Collection of stories and essays
2011 Collected Essays, Faber and Faber[35][36]
2015 Love + Hate: Stories and Essays, Faber & Faber
Plays and screenplays
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
Nonfiction
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
As editor
1995 The Faber Book of Pop. London: Faber and Faber
Filmography
Kureishi's films include:[37][38]
Screenplays
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
Story basis only
2001 Intimacy
Producer
2006 Souvenir
Shattered
by Hanif Kureishi
Hamish Hamilton, [pounds sterling]18.99, pp. 328
You'd think a book about a paralysed man lying in hospital for a year would be bound to be depressing. It never is. Hanif Kureishi is such an exhilarating writer that you read agog even when he's describing having his nappies changed or fingers stuck up his bottom.
It all started on Boxing Day 2022 when he was sitting watching television in his girlfriend Isabella's flat in Rome. He wasn't drunk, he wasn't stoned, but suddenly he felt a bit dizzy, put his head between his knees and fell off the sofa. In doing so, he somehow broke his neck and became tetraplegic. As a result, he cannot move his arms or legs, he cannot feed himself or scratch his nose or hold a pen. If he cries, he cannot wipe away his tears. But luckily he can still talk, and that is how he has produced Shattered, by dictating it to his son Carlo. He says: 'I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.'
His narrative starts on 6 January 2023, less than a fortnight after his accident, in the Gemelli Hospital, Rome. For the first few days he was too traumatised to speak, but now his twin sons, Carlo and Sachin, have come to visit and he has decided to dictate his thoughts to Carlo, 'to give form to this chaos I have fallen into, to stop myself from dying inside'. On 17 January he is moved to a bigger, better hospital, the Santa Lucia, where he is hoisted into a wheelchair and taken to the gym. He has never been to a gym before and loves it. He adores Italian men--the physios are all so handsome--and decides to become an Italian citizen. He also decides to propose to Isabella and, much to his surprise, she accepts. 'As I prepare for life as a married man, I am wondering what colour to paint my nails.'
He intersperses his hospital diary with reminiscences about his childhood and youth. He adored his father, the Buddha of Suburbia, but his mother was 'the most boring person I ever met... She had not the slightest interest in charming or entertaining anyone, least of all me'. He was bullied at school, where he was called 'Paki' or 'Shit-face', so he decided to call himself a writer--even before he had written anything.
His first published efforts were pornographic stories for skin mags such as May-fair, but he also wrote plays and got himself an internship at the Royal Court Theatre, where he came to know Samuel Beckett, drinking in the bar. 'Contrary to popular belief, he wasn't a miserable git. If a young woman approached him with a pile of his books, Sam would look cheerful and sign them gladly.' Another great event was meeting Salman Rushdie in a bookshop and Rushdie giving him a copy of Midnight's Children. He read it in one sitting, walked down to the river, drank a bottle of wine and then read it all over again. Rushdie became a good friend and has written to him every day since his accident.
The irresistible thing about Kureishi, it soon emerges, is that he is passionately interested in other people, and 'I have to say that becoming paralysed is a great way to meet new people'. In fact he reckons he has made more friends in hospital than in the past five years. One of his new hospital friends, Miss S, tells him that 'hospital is often painful and boring, but it is usually interesting', and so it is when Kureishi is writing.
In June he is flown back to London. From the taxi over Hammersmith flyover he can almost see his house and finds it heartbreaking. He wants to go home, not to another hospital. But he is taken to the Chelsea and Westminster, where he is put in a side room off the dementia ward and not allowed to mix with other patients because it turns out he has an antibiotic-resistant bug. He loses his appetite and gets depressed. The doctors put him on anti-depressants though he has no faith in them--he prefers to have weekly phone sessions with his psychoanalyst, who he has been going to for almost 30 years.
Then he is moved to the Charing Cross hospital, where lots of friends come to visit. Carlo is pleased because
the liberal elite are in and out, crossing over with one another... Apparently, I've got quite a party going on here, but since I refuse to be cheered up, I can only vaguely enjoy it.
Kureishi gets particularly cross when visitors talk about their holidays and say they're off to Tuscany for two weeks but will visit him when they get back. 'I'm going nowhere. No wonder I feel like shit. Fuck them, their holidays, and their fucking happiness.'
His house is only 15 minutes away and he longs to be there, but first he has to stay in a fifth hospital, a spinal rehab place in Stan-more, north London, which has good physio facilities but is a long way for visitors to come. He makes friends with a fellow patient, Jon, who was recently injured in a rock-climbing accident. But, unlike Kureishi, Jon is bent on suicide. He reckons that if he can wheel himself into the garden unobserved, he can die of hypothermia in 12 minutes. But Kureishi points out that the weather is unusually mild and he could be sitting out there for hours.
On 20 December, almost exactly a year after his accident, Kureishi is finally back home, though of course it is different. The living room has been converted into a bedroom plus bathroom and there is a bedroom at the top of the house for a live-in carer. The council also sends a succession of visiting carers to get him into and out of bed. They are all immigrants, and he notes:
Having lived and worked in a white world for the best part of 40 years, most of my adult life, I am back where I began with my father, his family and friends.
The looming fear is that, with tax cuts pending, the number of his NHS carers could be reduced. 'There is a risk I may have to sell my house in order to get my arse wiped.'
Meanwhile, he dictates his book to Carlo for three hours every morning and Isabella takes him to Tesco in the afternoons where he enjoys whizzing about the aisles. But he worries about Isabella having to do all the cooking and housework, and feels guilty that 'my contribution is zilch'. They spend Christmas Day with Sachin and Carlo's mother Tracey, who has been a great support throughout even though he left her when the twins were only two. He remembers his last Christmas with Isabella's family in Rome, the day before he fell on his head and was changed forever:
My world has taken a zig where previously it zagged; it has been smashed, remade and altered, and there is nothing I can do about it. But I will not go under; I will make something of this.
He has indeed. I've never felt tempted to use the word 'inspirational' about a book, and promise I never will again, but it's the only word I can think of to describe Shattered.
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Barber, Lynn. "A great way to meet people." Spectator, vol. 356, no. 10236, 2 Nov. 2024, pp. 43+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815088535/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=982a1a6b. Accessed 4 July 2025.
In 2022 an accident left the novelist paralysed. His blackly comic memoir, Shattered, is a devastating portrait of an imprisoned mind.
In 2014, reflecting on his career to date, Hanif Kureishi remarked to an interviewer that the great thing about being a writer is that "every ten years you become somebody else". Between the mid-1970s and early-1980s he served his apprenticeship, writing dirty stories for pornographic magazines and plays for the Royal Court. The mid-1980s marked a new phase, when he wrote the screenplay for the Stephen Frears Oscar-nominated film My Beautiful Launderette (19S5), and peaked with the tremendous commercial and critical success of his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, published in 1990. Three years later it was filmed by the BBC with a David Bowie soundtrack. Kureishi was the cool new voice of multicultural Britain.
The birth of twin boys marked the beginning of a third, more difficult period, perhaps best captured by the short, claustrophobic novel Intimacy (199S), which traps the reader in the mind of a man steeling himself to leave his wife and children--echoing Kureishi himself, who had left the mother of his children not long before the book was published. In the subsequent decade he continued to produce a considerable variety and volume of work--novels, stories, essays, screenplays--but somewhat removed from the spotlight; taken, after so long, for granted. In 2013 he was defrauded of his life savings. Later that year he took up a creative writing professorship at Kingston University.
On Boxing Day 2022 another phase began, both in Kureishi's life and his writing career--which, after all this time and all that ink, might be said to be more or less the same thing. It was as defining a moment as any in his life to date. He was in Rome, watching a football match on his iPad at the apartment of Isabella, his now wife, when he began to feel dizzy. He leant forward and put his head between his legs. When he came to, he was lying in a pool of blood with a "scooped, semicircular object with talons scuttling towards me". This, he realised, was his own hand, "an uncanny thing over which I had no agency".
Questions about agency--the acceptance or otherwise of losing it, and possible routes towards its reclamation are central to Shattered, Kureishi's memoir of his first year as a tetraplegic, paralysed in all four limbs. "In layman's terms," he explains in the book's first entry, dated just 11 days after the accident, "the vertebrae at the top of my spine suffered a kind of whiplash". Or, as he puts it a few entries later, "Two weeks ago a bomb went off in my life which has also shattered the lives of those around me." His daily accounts of his new reality, lived out in five hospitals in Rome and London and then, many months later, his remodelled home, initially appeared on X before migrating to Substack. Now the first year's worth have been edited into this remarkable book.
Kureishi's entries were typed up first by Isabella and then his three sons. Carlo became the main collaborator and is thanked by his father in the acknowledgements as "my right hand". Earlier, displaying his taste for a certain comic brutality, Kureishi introduces Carlo to the reader by declaring that what he likes about him "is that he can type quickly". There's plenty of this sort of provocative fun: "Since I became a vegetable I have never been so busy"; "I have to say that becoming paralysed is a great way to meet new people"; "The only good thing to be said for paralysis is that you don't have to move to shit and piss." But there is also a frankness to his writing which can be startlingly moving: "I wish what had happened to me had never happened," he says at one point, with devastating simplicity.
Of being shaved by his son Sachin, Carlo's twin, he writes, "He looks after me as I once looked after him, but with less complaint." When a fellow patient comes to see him, Kureishi asks "if we can be friends. I plead with her to not let me go." His vulnerability is absolute.
As someone who has spent several months in hospital over the past two years, I recognise the desperate feeling Kureishi describes taking hold when the last visitor of the day departs, leaving only the "long fear and desolation of the night" ahead. Visitors become an essential reminder that life continues beyond the all-consuming fact of one's illness. The best sort, Kureishi judges, stay for at least one hour and are "the self-absorbed ones, people who talk about themselves, bringing in the outside world".
Kureishi's book doesn't follow a familiar arc of triumph over adversity. It isn't grim then optimistic, despairing then hopeful, embittered then affirming. It is all these things in a churning cycle, which is what makes it so absorbing. It can move, sometimes with shocking speed, from praise of human kindness ("there's a lot of it about") to an account of a depressing trip along the River Walk in Hammersmith, Kureishi one in a group of patients in various states of paralysis, reflecting on the "present hell" of his life. Or from a tender moment between him and one of his sons, or Isabella, to fantasies of suicide by drug overdose.
"One of the things about lying in a hospital bed for hours on end," Kureishi writes, "is that you start to remember in a way you didn't before, often in elaborate detail ... If you have no future, the past comes back to you." Shattered reflects this state, moving fluidly from an account of goings on at one or other hospital and occasional updates on his recovery ("I can stand for about 20 minutes with physios either side of me. I can move a computer mouse a few inches") to memories of his youth in Bromley, or of meeting film directors in LA when he was up for an Oscar, or of moving into and out of flats in West Kensington and Hammersmith, which has long been his patch of London.
It is a diary, a memoir and sometimes even a creative writing handbook, thoughts on literature and how to tell a story never being far from Kureishi's mind. Some entries are elegantly shaped, others closer to a catalogue of scattered thoughts. Occasionally they are banal. The overall effect is that of an ongoing and intimate conversation, one that spans many emotional hues. There is gratitude for the devotion of his family and the kindness of friends, grousing (he wants to clout whoever first appended "creative" to "writing"), misery ("sitting here again in this dreary room for another week, like a Beckettian chattering mouth") and ribald anecdote (a threesome in Amsterdam, dictated to an apprehensive son).
Reading Shattered I thought about Knife, the account by Kureishi's friend, Salman Rushdie, of his recovery from a near-fatal stabbing by an Islamic fanatic. Kureishi discusses the impact Midnight's Children (19S1) had on him: blown away, he read it twice in a row. In his second novel, The Black Album (1995), set in 19S9, the year Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Rushdie, a group of Islamic fundamentalist students burn The Satanic Verses. Given the connections between the two men, it is a strange and unfortunate quirk of fate that they should both have reason to publish books about life-threatening physical devastation in the same year.
Their accounts share an impulse towards humour, although their manner of expression differs. "Dear reader," Rushdie writes, "if you have never had a catheter inserted into your genital organ, do your very best to keep that record intact." Kureishi's warning is deadpan, bleaker but also funnier: "I wouldn't advise having an accident like mine."
Indeed, one of the funniest lines in the book involves Rushdie. Remembering an earlier spell in hospital Kureishi writes: "The last time a medical digit entered my backside was a few years ago. As the nurse flipped me over she asked, 'How long did it take you to write Midnight's Children?' I replied, 'If I had indeed written that, don't you think I would have gone private?'"
There is a scene in The Black Album in which the main character, Shahid, settles himself in a pub with a toastie and a novel and, pencil in hand, "tried to see how the author achieved an effect, which he would trace and then transform with his own characters, in his reporter's notebook". He finds the sensation "tremendous, more than satisfying; his imagination stirred and took grip". It is poignant to think of this depiction of the creative act, which feels so personal, in the shadow of the Shattered entry in which Kureishi explains why he can no longer write fiction: "My imagination feels muted. I have lost my spark a bit. My circumstances have become so strange that I can't locate an idea of myself. I can't write fiction--stories, movies or novels--because my condition is so urgent that inhabiting other worlds feels impossible."
That Kureishi has written at all throughout this ordeal is both remarkable--despair, which he has clearly often felt in the past two years, is not a spur to productivity--and obvious: it is the way he engages with the world and has been for much of his nearly 70 years on the planet. That Shattered is a book he could not have written without this calamity befalling him must be of scant comfort, yet these dispatches from its front line are extraordinary.
Chris Power is the author of the story collection "Mothers" and the novel "A Lonely Man" (both Faber and Faber)
Shattered
Hanif Kureishi
Hamish Hamilton, 336pp, 18.99 [pounds sterling]
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 New Statesman, Ltd.
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Power, Chris. "Hanif Kureishi's interrupted life." New Statesman, vol. 153, no. 5788, 8 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A834840376/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7284a504. Accessed 4 July 2025.
Kureishi, Hanif SHATTERED Ecco/HarperCollins (NonFiction None) $28.00 2, 4 ISBN: 9780063360501
After the fall.
In 2022, Kureishi, then 68, collapsed at his partner's apartment in Italy, partially breaking his neck and suffering spinal nerve damage and resulting tetraplegia, a near-complete paralysis of his hands, arms, and legs. Dictating verbal diary entries to his partner, Isabella, from his hospital bed in Italy, then in West London, the celebrated British Pakistani playwright (My Beautiful Laundrette,The Buddha of Suburbia) details his struggle to heal and thrive despite immense pain, frustration, and a missing sense of time, as well as the toll this crushing ordeal would have on his relationship with Isabella: "We will have to find a new way of loving each other," he admits. Enhancing these provocative entries are the author's ruminations and pointed perspectives on his life, career, family, childhood, sex, Isabella (whom he proposes to while incapacitated), and his friendship with Salman Rushdie, "one of the bravest men I know." He also considers the fascist nature of Italian government and how it affects the precarious lives of young queer and nonbinary individuals. Psychologically processing his life-altering condition is one thing, but Kureishi must also contend with his arduous, agonizing, and helpless physical condition and the ensuing rehabilitation suddenly thrust upon him. Yet despite feeling "battered and broken," the ever-resilient author manages to inject levity and revelatory catharsis into his daunting "new reality." He contemplates how becoming paralyzed affords him the opportunity to meet and empathize with new people, and he ponders the possibilities of somehow achieving some type of modified sexual pleasure again. The memoir is also cautionary for readers who mistakenly believe they are blessed with hardship immunity: "There isn't a family on the planet that will evade catastrophe or disaster." Kureishi harrowingly reminds us that it takes just one fall to upend an entire lifetime, forever.
Refashioning his life after an accident--with grace, dignity, and black humor.
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"Kureishi, Hanif: SHATTERED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A821608448/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=50863ebc. Accessed 4 July 2025.
Life took a sudden, terrible turn when the prolific novelist and screenwriter suffered catastrophic spine damage in late 2022. In an email interview, he described how blogging ''helped me survive.'' SCOTT HELLER
How do you organize your books?
I have a vague idea of where everything is, though I have spent whole afternoons looking for particular volumes. Since my accident, when I became tetraplegic, I am unable to access my library at all or open a physical copy of any book.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
I read a tremendous amount: adventure stories, school stories, biographies of sportsmen and, later, the European classics, which my father had in his library. I am surprised by how little I remember. It's all gone, except for a memory of pleasure which never leaves me.
What's the last great book you read (or listened to)?
In hospital I listened to Miriam Margolyes reading Dickens's ''Bleak House,'' doing all the voices. Pure genius.
What's the funniest book you've ever read?
Probably ''Joy in the Morning,'' by P.G. Wodehouse.
The filthiest?
''Story of O.''
What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?
Edmund Bergler's ''The Superego: Unconscious Conscience, the Key to the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis.''
What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?
Just before my accident somebody gave me a novel by Andrea Lawlor called ''Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl,'' which I read twice. It's a picaresque set in the early '90s in various American locations and concerns leather bars, blow jobs and gender shifts which are fascinating and often very funny.
Lying in a hospital bed can be a ''good form of shock therapy for a stuck writer,'' you write in ''Shattered.'' Where did getting unstuck take your imagination?
A few days after my accident, while I was in intensive care in Rome, I had a very strong desire to record the story of what was happening to me. I hadn't felt such a strong impulse to write for a long time. This new form of writing -- the blog -- suited me very well as a kind of diary of distress. And being able to publish it on Twitter and then on Substack gave me access to a huge, responsive audience. This helped me survive the horror of what I was experiencing.
What was the challenge of editing these writings into a book?
The original blogs were dictated to my partner, Isabella d'Amico, and my sons in very difficult circumstances. I was in bad physical and psychological condition in various hospitals. The following year Simon Prosser, my renowned editor, came to the house day after day, working with my son Carlo and me to create a tight and sharp version of the blogs, a more coherent narrative which could be read all the way through.
At one point, you bemoan the absence of explicit sexuality in great literature, wishing you could learn what some ''favorite characters did in bed.'' Which ones?
I think of the characters in Dostoyevsky, an author who fascinated me when I was young. His people are weird and often perverse. But you always feel with him that you are not hearing the whole story, as with many other authors, particularly homosexuals.
Your 2017 novel ''The Nothing'' is about a man in a wheelchair who requires steady care. Have you looked at it since your injury?
I never look at my books again unless I have to adapt them for another form, as I did recently with my first novel, ''The Buddha of Suburbia,'' which was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company. As for ''The Nothing,'' I'm aware it reflects some of my present condition of physical helplessness and frustration.
What subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
With many of them I wish they would write less.
You describe yourself as ''relieved not to be a young writer today.'' What impact do you think changing literary values have had on your own reputation?
As a writing teacher I have become aware of the difficulties some of my students have to endure when it comes to writing across cultures or about subjects that the authors don't inhabit entirely. I mean, white writers writing Black characters and vice versa and so on, and issues like so-called cultural appropriation. It is difficult enough as it is to write without these additional barriers, which would certainly have bothered me had I been trying to write ''The Buddha of Suburbia'' today.
You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Certainly my dear friend Zadie Smith, whose company I love -- a woman full of gossip, filth and gorgeous, intelligent storytelling. I would also invite my pal Salman Rushdie, a brilliant raconteur and fabulous companion, full of jokes and fun. Franz Kafka would be a wonderful addition to the party: I believe he was a witty and wicked companion. Zadie, Salman and I could ask him what has gone wrong with the world?
Email interview conducted and edited by Scott Heller. An expanded version is available at nytimes.com/books.
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"Hanif Kureishi." The New York Times Book Review, 2 Feb. 2025, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A825860113/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=92c4fa1b. Accessed 4 July 2025.
In a new memoir, Hanif Kureishi reflects on a life transformed since he lost the use of his arms and legs.
SHATTERED: A Memoir, by Hanif Kureishi
In December 2022, in Rome, fate took Hanif Kureishi by the wrong hand. He was sitting in the living room of his girlfriend's apartment, watching a soccer game on his iPad. Suddenly he felt dizzy. He leaned forward and blacked out. He woke up several minutes later in a pool of his own blood, his neck awkwardly twisted.
Kureishi was 68. He was rendered, instantly, paralyzed below the neck, able to wiggle his toes but unable to scratch an itch, grip a pen or feed himself, let alone walk. Kureishi, who is British Pakistani, is a well-known screenwriter and novelist. His paralysis made international news, and many began to follow his updates on his progress, which he posted via dictation on social media.
Now comes a memoir, ''Shattered,'' with further updates. The news this book delivers, as regards his physical condition, is not optimistic. He has progressed little. He wrestles mightily with who he is, now that he must rely on others for nearly everything except talking and breathing. His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret -- for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life.
It's hard to get across how counterculturally famous Kureishi was in the 1980s and '90s. He wrote the screenplay for Stephen Frears's raffish art-house film ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' (1985), about a young Pakistani man who is given a derelict laundromat in London by his uncle and hopes to turn it into a success.
That movie arrived in the wake of Salman Rushdie's ''Midnight's Children'' (1981), the most influential novel of the late 20th century. Both were fresh and sharply drawn works about postcolonialism and its discontents, a topic that Rushdie and Kureishi dragged, alive and squirming, to the forefront of the culture. The men became friends.
Kureishi photographed a bit better than Rushdie did. With his lion's mane of dark curls, he resembled a pop star or a hipster prince more than a writerly mole person. Thus, it is one of the jokes in ''Shattered'' when Kureishi recalls the time a nurse asked, while plunging a gloved finger into his backside: ''How long did it take you to write 'Midnight's Children'?''
He replied that if he'd written ''Midnight's Children,'' he would not be in the care of England's public health system.
In a darker parallelism, Rushdie too has written a recent memoir of horror and recovery.
Kureishi wrote the screenplay for Frears's next movie, the romantic comedy ''Sammy and Rosie Get Laid'' (1987), and then published his first and best-known novel, ''The Buddha of Suburbia,'' in 1990. He has since written many more screenplays and novels but none have so captured the conversation.
When the press began to write about his accident, Kureishi says in ''Shattered,'' he began to feel like Huck Finn at his own funeral. Most of the accounts of his life and career were flattering. There is a bit of that life and career in this memoir, but more often we are in the present tense, as in: ''Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.''
Bodily eliminations are a central topic. He learns to get over the humiliation of not being able to cope with these on his own. Caregivers always seem to be feeling around back there. At one point Kureishi cries out to his readers, ''I now designate my arse Route 66.''
The importance of touch, of small physical kindnesses, is felt in nearly every paragraph. It has ever been true: Kindness is the coin of the realm, accepted everywhere. Looking back at his life, Kureishi writes: ''I wish I had been kinder; and if I get another chance, I will be.''
Remorse runs through this memoir's veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself; he studies the blueprint of his own heart; he does not always like what he sees. He recalls being spoiled and self-centered and not, for example, welcoming the arrivals of his three sons. He hated taking them to sports events; he was used to doing what he wanted.
While his girlfriend and later wife, Isabella, cares for him in his new state, he wonders if he would have done the same for her. He was often distant, to her and others. His injury has brought him so much good will from so many people; he wonders if he would have reacted similarly.
Kureishi comes to feel ''like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen.'' His favorite visitors are big talkers. Speaking takes a lot out of him. He remarks that ''becoming paralyzed is a great way to meet new people.''
While he is in rehab, trying to regain motor skills, Kureishi confronts the contingencies of all our lives. Those around him have suffered motorcycle crashes, falls from ladders and trampolines, dives into empty swimming pools, sports injuries, a litany of freak and not-so-freak accidents.
Many incapacitated people, including famous ones like Christopher Reeve, have written books. The paralysis memoir with the most sophistication and sensitivity, that constantly taps into life's mother lode, is ''The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'' (1997), by Jean-Dominique Bauby. He was 43, the editor of Elle France, when he suffered a brainstem stroke. He wrote his sumptuous book by blinking to select letters while the alphabet was recited to him.
''Shattered'' does not reach such heights. We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi's best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.
SHATTERED: A Memoir | By Hanif Kureishi | Ecco | 328 pp. | $28
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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PHOTO: Hanif Kureishi in 2024, two years after a grievous injury. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RAPHAEL NEAL/AGENCE VU, VIA REDUX) This article appeared in print on page BR9.
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Garner, Dwight. "Strong Motion." The New York Times Book Review, 9 Mar. 2025, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A830157608/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=469171fe. Accessed 4 July 2025.