Hanif Kureishi
Biography
Hanif Kureishi is one of Britain’s foremost playwrights, screenwriters and novelists. Born in Bromley, south London in 1954 to an Indian-born migrant father and English mother, Kureishi was among the first generation of post-war children of South Asian descent to grow up in Britain. In consequence, his life-story is intimately bound up with the country’s history of immigration and social change. He attended Bromley Technical comprehensive school before reading philosophy at King’s College London. While studying at King’s he began working at the Royal Court Theatre. He had early success as a playwright, writing for Hampstead Theatre, the Soho Poly Theatre and the Royal Court, his breakthrough coming in 1985 with his Oscar-nominated screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette. Alongside his play and screenwriting, he achieved considerable success as a novelist with The Buddha of Suburbia winning the Whitbread first novel award in 1990, for example. Later novels and films include Intimacy (1997), Venus (2005), Le Week-End (2013), The Last Word (2014) and The Nothing (2016).
Kureishi was awarded CBE for services to literature and drama in 2008 and his archive was acquired by the British Library in 2014. On Boxing Day 2022, Kureishi suffered an accident in Rome which has left him paralysed and unable to hold a pen. His harrowing and sometimes mischievous dispatches dictated to his sons were collected in his memoir, Shattered, published in 2024.
Scarred by the brutal racism of his contemporaries, their parents and some teachers, his talent was forged in retaliation to these experiences. Class and education also shaped the mixed-raced child of empire growing up in the post-war suburbs and attending the local comprehensive school. At the same time, his talented, literary father and Pakistani uncles gave an immediate possibility of a wider world. He came from a whole family of writers.
Writing
From the 1980s, Hanif Kureishi, the British-born, mixed-race Indian/Pakistani and English writer, playwright and filmmaker, has redefined British multiculturalism and what it means to be British.
Published in 1990, Hanif Kureishi’s coming-of-age novel The Buddha of Suburbia evolved out of a short story of the same title. The autobiographical strain in both made perfect sense to him. For, read though Kureishi might, he could find no half-Asian boy protagonists in British literature, no stories about growing up mixed-race in the suburbs in which someone like him made it to centre-stage. […] The novel The Buddha of Suburbia dramatises the combustible intersection of the absorbing, colliding social worlds its mixed-raced narrator Karim occupies. In their formative years, Karim and his friend Jamila experiment with a range of identities because they are not allowed to be English: ‘sometimes we were French, Jammie and I, and other times we went black American. The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were always wog and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it’ (The Buddha of Suburbia 35). In this and related ways The Buddha of Suburbia not only shifts our understandings of ‘Britishness’ and ‘belonging’, but presciently identified these key questions of identity that would resonate and remain hotly contested for decades to come. (from Writing the Self 312; 329)
—Edited extract from the biography by Ruvani Ranasinha, Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self (Manchester University Press, 2023).
—Ruvani Ranasinha, 2025
Cite this: Ranasinha, Ruvani. “Hanif Kureishi.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2025, https://writersmakeworlds.com/hanif-kureishi. Accessed 15 April 2025.