Place of birth

Bromley, England

Location(s)

Barons Court
London
United Kingdom
Shepherd's Bush, London
W12 8PH
United Kingdom
Whitehall Gardens
Bromley
United Kingdom

About

Hanif Kureishi is one of Britain’s foremost playwrights, screenwriters and novelists. Born in south London to an Indian-born migrant father and English mother, Kureishi was among the first generation of post-war, British-born children of South Asian heritage to grow up in Britain. 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, continuing to later novels and films, notably Intimacy, Venus, Le Week-End, The Last Word and The Nothing. Kureishi was awarded a 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 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, in 2024.

David Bowie, Stephen Frears, Asif Kapadia, Akram Khan, Roger Michell, Udayan Prasad, Salman Rushdie.

My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings (London: Faber, 1996)

(ed. with Jon Savage), The Faber Book of Pop (London: Faber, 1995)

The Black Album (London: Faber, 1995)

Intimacy (London: Faber, 1997)

Dreaming and Scheming (London: Faber, 2002)

My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (London: Faber, 2004)

Something To Tell You (London: Faber, 2008)

The Last Word (London: Faber, 2014)

The Nothing (London: Faber, 2016)

Shattered (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2024)

Buchanan, Bradley, Hanif Kureishi (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Fischer, Susan (ed.) Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)

Kaleta, Kenneth, Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997)

Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Hanif Kureishi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)

Ranasinha, Ruvani, Hanif Kureishi: Writers and Their Works (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002)

Ranasinha, Ruvani, Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self. A Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023)

Thomas, Susie (ed.) Essential Guide to Hanif Kureishi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005)

Kureishi Archive, British Library, St Pancras

Image credit

By Nrbelex – own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8954299

Entry credit

Ruvani Ranasinha

Citation: ‘Hanif Kureishi’, South Asian Britain, https://southasianbritain-demo.rit.bris.ac.uk/people/hanif-kureishi/. Accessed: 5 July 2025.

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