Hanif Kureishi CBE (born December 5, 1954) is an English playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker, novelist and short story writer. The themes of his work have touched on topics of race, nationalism, immigration, and sexuality. In 2008, The Times named Kureishi in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Kureishi was born in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother. His father, Rafiushan, was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of British India in 1947. He came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies and later worked at the Pakistan Embassy. After his father and mother (Audrey Buss) married, the family settled in Bromley where Kureishi was born.
He attended Bromley Technical High School (where David Bowie had also been a pupil) and after taking his A levels at a local sixth form college, he spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University before dropping out. Later he attended King's College London and took a degree in philosophy.
Kureishi started his career in the '70s as a pornography writer.
He wrote My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980s London for a film directed by Stephen Frears. It won the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.
His book The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel, and was also made into a BBC television series with a soundtrack by David Bowie.
The next year, 1991, saw the release of the feature film entitled London Kills Me; a film written and directed by Kureishi himself.
His novel Intimacy (1998) revolved around the story of a man leaving his wife and two young sons after feeling physically and emotionally rejected by his wife. This created certain controversy as Kureishi himself had recently 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 to a movie Intimacy by Patrice Chéreau, which won two Bears at the Berlin Film Festival: a Golden Bear for Best Film, and a Silver Bear for Best Actress (Kerry Fox). It was controversial for its unreserved sex scenes. The book was translated into Persian by Niki Karimi in 2005.
His family have accused him of exploiting them with thinly disguised references in his work; Kureishi has denied the claims. His sister Yasmin has accused him of selling her family "down the line". She wrote, in a letter to The Guardian, that if her family's history had to become public she would not stand by and let it be "fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif's profit". She says that his description of her family's working class roots are fictitious. Their grandfather was not "cloth cap working class", their mother never worked in a shoe factory, and their father, she says, was not a bitter old man.
Yasmin takes up issues with her brother not merely for his thinly disguised autobiographical references in his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, but also for the image about his past that he portrays in newspaper interviews. She wrote: "My father was angry when The Buddha of Suburbia came out as he felt that Hanif had robbed him of his dignity, and he didn't speak to Hanif for about a year."
Kureishi's drama The Mother was adapted to a movie by Roger Michell, which won a joint First Prize in the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes Film Festival. It showed a cross-generational relationship with changed roles: a seventy-year-old English lady and grandmother (played by Anne Reid) who seduces her daughter's boyfriend (played by Daniel Craig), a thirty-year-old craftsman. Explicit sex scenes were shown in realistic drawings only, thus avoiding censorship.
His 2006 screenplay Venus saw Oscar, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild, Broadcast Film Critics Association and Golden Globe nominations for Peter O'Toole in the best actor category.
His latest novel, Something to Tell You, was published in 2008. His 1989 novel The Black Album, adapted for the theatre, was performed at the National Theatre in July and August 2009.
In 2009, he donated the short story Long Ago Yesterday to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. His story was published in the 'Earth' collection.
Kureishi is married, with twin boys, a younger son, and a parrot called Amis. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.
