Hanif Kureishi: In Black and White

Abstract

A restless and versatile writer, Hanif Kureishi (b. 1954) has worked as widely as any leading British novelist. He began his career as a playwright, has published extensively as an essayist, is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and has written radio plays and collections of short stories as well as novels. In common with the narrators of both The Buddha of Suburbia and Intimacy, Kureishi has a British mother and an Indian father, who came to England from Bombay at the time of India’s partition in 1947 while most of his large family went to live in Karachi. The only Asian boy at his school, Kureishi found himself caught between the working-class life of his friends in Bromley and the privileged background of his father’s family in Pakistan. He later studied philosophy at King’s College, London, while at the same time working at the Royal Court Theatre, where he first had a play performed in 1976.