Hanif Kureishi

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Biography

Playwright, screenwriter, novelist and film-maker Hanif Kureishi was born in Bromley, Kent in 1954 and read philosophy at King's College, London. His first play, Soaking the Heat, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976 and was followed in 1980 by The Mother Country, for which he won the Thames TV Playwright Award. In 1981 his play Outskirts won the George Devine Award and in 1982 he became Writer in Residence at the Royal Court Theatre.

His screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, was nominated for an Academy Award. The film was critically acclaimed for its sensitive depiction of a homosexual relationship between a gay skinhead and a young Asian man. He also wrote the screenplays for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and London Kills Me (1991), which he also directed. His film My Son the Fanatic was adapted from his short story included in Love in a Blue Time (1997). The film was first shown at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. His play Sleep With Me (1999) was first performed at the National Theatre in London in 1999, and was followed by When the Night Begins (2004), produced at the Hampstead Theatre in 2004.

Kureishi's first novel was the semi-autobiographical The Buddha of Suburbia, published in 1990. Karim, the novel's young hero ('an Englishman born and bred - almost'), like Kureishi, has a Pakistani father and an English mother. The novel describes Karim's struggle for social and sexual identity, a comic coming-of-age novel and a satirical portrait of race relations in Britain during the 1970s. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was produced by the BBC in 1993 as a four-part television series.

His second novel, The Black Album (1995), explores some of the issues facing the Muslim community living in Britain in the 1980s. Love in a Blue Time, his first collection of short stories, focuses on a series of characters working in the media.

Intimacy (1998), a novella, is a painful account of a man's decision to leave his partner and two young sons. It was produced as a film in 2001 starring Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox. His second short story collection, Midnight All Day (1999), continues to explore very personal issues about human relationships and sexual desire.

Gabriel's Gift (2001) tells the story of a 15-year-old schoolboy whose artistic skills enable him to survive the trauma of his parents' separation. Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics, a collection of Hanif Kureishi's non-fiction, including essays and diary fragments, as well as a new collection of short fiction, The Body and Other Stories, were both published in 2002. The Word and the Bomb (2005), is also a collection of non-fictional writings.

Hanif Kureishi's latest works are the play, Venus (2007), and the novel, Something to Tell You (2008). In 2009, his own stage adaptation of his novel The Black Album (2009), premiered at the National Theatre. He became a CBE in 2007, in recognition of his services to literature and drama.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Drama, Fiction, Non-fiction, Screenplay, Short stories

Bibliography

Borderline   Methuen, 1981

Birds of Passage   Amber Lane Press, 1983

Outskirts and Other Plays   Calder, 1983

My Beautiful Laundrette   Faber and Faber, 1986

Buddha of Suburbia   Faber and Faber, 1990

London Kills Me: Screenplay   Faber and Faber, 1991

The Black Album   Faber and Faber, 1995

The Faber Book of Pop   (editor with Jon Savage)   Faber and Faber, 1996

Love in a Blue Time   Faber and Faber, 1997

Intimacy   Faber and Faber, 1998

My Son, the Fanatic   (screenplay)   Faber and Faber, 1998

Midnight All Day   Faber and Faber, 1999

Sleep with Me   Faber and Faber, 1999

Gabriel's Gift   Faber and Faber, 2001

Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics   Faber and Faber, 2002

The Body and Other Stories   Faber and Faber, 2002

The Mother   Faber and Faber, 2003

My Ear at His Heart   Faber and Faber, 2004

When The Night Begins   Faber and Faber, 2004

The Word and the Bomb   Faber and Faber, 2005

Venus   Faber and Faber, 2007

Something to Tell You   Faber and Faber, 2008

The Black Album   (play)   Faber and Faber, 2009

Read about books by Hanif Kureishi at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Hanif Kureishi at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1980   Thames Television Playwright Award   The Mother Country

1981   George Devine Award   Outskirts

1990   Whitbread First Novel Award   The Buddha of Suburbia

2007   CBE

2007   National Short Story Competition   (shortlist - 'Weddings and Beheadings')

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Critical Perspective

In his memoir My Ear at His Heart (2004), Hanif Kurieishi’s starting point is finding an unpublished manuscript of his late father’s (‘dad’s little story concerns desire and the humiliation which follows it’) and discovering within it things previously unknown to him. What follows is a revealing narrative, ‘a quest, for my place in father’s history and fantasy’; discussing their difficult personal relationship and differing life experiences in the UK and the Subcontinent. It turns into a fascinating account of Kureishi’s own development as a writer, in which the theme of ‘Fathers and Sons’ has been prominent, especially in novels such as Gabriel’s Gift (2001) and Something to Tell You (2008). The book also tells us about the personal dimensions of his major themes – sexuality and politics: ‘for me, the only place these puzzles could sit together was in fiction’. These are in his works complicated by racial and cultural issues, but also lightened by subversive humour. Kureishi observes, with some frankness, the family history underlying his screenplay for the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette (1986), and the best-selling novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). His father’s ‘love of the [London] suburbs’, his experiences of colonial prejudice, and later mixed-race marriage in the England of the 1950s, in turn stimulated Kureishi to write – and put ‘desire at the centre of the family’.
 
About the origins of his concerns, Kureishi explained that ‘I came to some sort of self and political consciousness in the 1970s …. If you wanted to work in the theatre, as I did, it was impossible to escape the argument that culture was inevitably political’. Kureishi’s first play, Borderline (1981), concerned Asian immigrants in Southall, and was put on at the radical Royal Court theatre in the early 1980s; Kureishi learned through rehearsal workshops that ‘groups reproduced, in fantasy, the family dynamic’. Kureishi had experienced housing squats, pop culture and drinking (‘I got to know London by way of its pubs’) that have infused the hedonistic aspects of his writing ever since. Kureishi is a writer whose plays or fiction can equally be thought of as ‘theatrical’: skilled in dialogue and characterization, with a fine line in satirical comedy. He is a writer of the Zeitgeist, inspired by the social issues of the day, as well as ‘the condition of England’. This is true of his early plays and film screenplays, satirizing the entrepreneurial values of 1980s Britain. My Beautiful Laundrette for instance, in which a young Asian man takes over the running of his uncle’s dilapidated laundry business, making it into a hip enterprise – assisted by his gay white lover, a former skinhead racist.

The evolution of multi-racial and multi-cultural London during the 1970s, as seen by a young mixed-race Indian man, is the background of The Buddha of Suburbia. Yet it is a very funny book, its social issues handled with a great sense of farce. There are tensions between generations, children outraging their parents. These are overlaid by racial tensions and the disruptive nature of sexual desire in all its forms, including gay sex, bi-sexuality, and suburban swinging. Its narrator Karim is aware of his father’s affair with a social climbing interior designer, while he himself is involved with her son (who later becomes the rock star ‘Charlie Hero’ and makes cameo appearances in later novels). Karim is a would-be actor, making his uncertain way in London theatre, with a debut in an awful production of The Jungle Book and participation in an orgy staged by radical director Dyke. Alongside all this frantic activity in hip artistic circles goes the Asian world of home, with its traditional values and business ethics. The inevitable collision between these two antithetical worlds gives the book an enduring comic appeal. The action ends significantly with Karim’s return to London on the eve of the 1979 General Election.

The economic and social tensions of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain gave Kureishi a vibrant subject matter for many years, as he articulates in the essays collected in Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (2002). ‘Bradford’ for example concerns a visit to the city in the light of its mid-1980s race controversy. Kureishi examines not only racial prejudice but also, increasingly, the clash of cultural and religious values, western secular liberalism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. The latter informs his novel The Black Album (1995) in its story of Shahid, a student involved with his college tutor who goes to raves and takes drugs; he becomes involved with Muslim students and the firebombing of a bookshop stocking Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel.

From books such as Intimacy (1998) and Gabriel’s Gift (2001) onwards, Kureishi’s writing takes on less public and more personal themes. Intimacy has been seen as one of the best of ‘male testimonials’ about mid-life masculinity and its discontents. It consists of a screenwriter’s thoughts on the night before leaving his wife and children, about what happens in falling out of love; concluding that ‘to move on is an infidelity … to old notions of oneself’. He faces his anguish over the decision, and in pursuit of a young lover becomes painfully aware of his own ageing. Gabriel’s Gift is more affirmative, about how a 15-year-old boy of precocious talents encourages his estranged father, a broken-down musician, to regain self-respect. The boy’s efforts to reconcile his parents dramatize the confused state of contemporary family life.

Kureishi’s memoir mentions his experience of psychoanalysis, observing that ‘the blank sheet of paper is like the analyst’s silence’. A psychoanalyst is the narrator and leading character of his latest novel, Something to Tell You (2008). At the opening, Jamal tells us ‘Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most’. This is a good summary of the plot, as it unfolds a long confession about people and events from the 1970s, when Jamal was living a rackety bohemian life in London, in and out of the theatre world, pubs and beds. The confession is not only personal but societal; the flashbacks illuminate a now-vanished hedonistic world of sexual promiscuity, drugs and violent social reactions. Back in the present day, his feckless sister and his best friend persuade him to join a swinger’s circuit. Equally, he likes the fact that London is now ‘one of the great Muslim cities’. But his main concern is his relationship with his 12-year-old son Rafi. Whether Jamal’s confession is cathartic or not, by its end he is – ready to see his next lucrative patient. Albeit with an air of world-weary wisdom, Hanif Kureishi’s ability to keep the self and society, sexual foibles and social issues in satirical perspective, is as vibrant as ever.

Dr Jules Smith, 2008  

For an in-depth critical review see Hanif Kureishi by Ruvani Ranasinha (Northcote House, 2002: Writers and their Work Series).

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Faber and Faber Ltd 3 Queen Square London  WC1N 3AU Tel: +44 (0) 20 7465 0045 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7465 0034 E-mail: gapublicity@faber.co.uk http://www.faber.co.uk

Agent Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd 20 Powis Mews London  W11 1JN England Tel: +44 (0)20 7221 3717 Fax: +44 (0)20 7229 9084 http://www.rcwlitagency.co.uk

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