Authors | Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Great Britain    PWF 2012

“The London I liked was the city of exiles, refugees and immigrants, those for whom the metropolis was extraterrestrial, the English codes unbreakable, people who didn’t have a place and didn’t know who they were.”

Hanif Kureishi was born in 1954 in Bromley, London. A great talent—with a killer’s instinct—he seems to have spent his days with “the promiscuous, the frigid, the panicked, the abusers and abused trapped and committed for life to their own foolishness.”

How does he write—? “You lie on a couch and then you start saying, I had this dream—I was being eaten by a bear.”

A soothsayer of the sixties, Kureishi’s appeal is political and emotional—dramatic—as the current failure of our imagination. “We’ve created a sort of extreme capitalism where people are objects and everything is bought and sold continuously. Is that what we wanted?”

His themes of race, nationalism, immigration and sexuality spook the new Puritanism. “I don’t believe in the idea of the soul anymore. There are some f***s for which a person would have their partner and children drown in a freezing sea.”

Kureishi’s work includes: fiction—The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album, Intimacy, The Body, Something to Tell You, and Collected Stories—plays and screenplays: My Beautiful Launderette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Sleep With Me, The Mother, and Venus.

Hanif Kureishi lives in London.