Hanif Kureishi – författare

'It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.' Jay is leaving his partner and their two sons. As the long night before his departure unfolds, in an unforgettable, and often pitiless, reflection on their time together he analyses the joys and agonies of trying to make a life with another person.

Omar is a restless young Asian man, caring for his alcoholic father in the hustling London of the mid-1980s. His uncle, a keen Thatcherite, offers Omar an entrepreneurial opportunity to revamp a dingy laundrette, and ambitious Omar rolls up his sleeves, enlisting the assistance of his old school-friend Johnny, who has since fallen in with a gang of neo-fascists. Omar and Johnny soon form an unlikely alliance that leads to business success, as well as other, more intimate surprises.

A BELOVED CLASSIC - WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH'A naughty, bubbly book.'ZADIE SMITH'Wickedly funny.' NEW YORK TIMES'Utterly irreverent and wildly improper, but also genuinely touching and truthful.'SALMAN RUSHDIE'My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.'As the teenage hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel, Karim is desperate to escape suburban South London and experience the forbidden fruits which the 1970s seem to offer. When the unlikely opportunity of a life in the theatre announces itself, he starts to win the sort of attention he has been craving, albeit with some rude and raucous results.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2025From Hanif Kureishi, author of The Buddha of Suburbia, a memoir about the accident that left him paralysed.___________________‘A few days ago, a bomb went off in my life, but this bomb has also shattered the lives of those around me. My partner, my children, my friends.’On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, in a pool of blood, he was horrified to realise he had lost the use of his limbs.He could no longer walk, write or wash himself. He could do nothing without the help of others, and required constant care in a hospital. So began an odyssey of a year through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home, to his house in London.While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or to hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words which formed in his head. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed – a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, clarity and courage.This book takes these hospital dispatches – edited, expanded and meticulously interwoven with new writing – and charts both a shattering and a reassembling: a new life born of pain and loss, but animated by new feelings – of gratitude, humility and love.‘Moving, funny, remarkable’ Richard Eyre'Extraordinary, unique and unputdownable' Independent

The follow-up to Hanif Kureishi’s extraordinary hospital memoir, Shattered, this is the story of what came next – a year of living at home in London after paralysis, told through scenes of carers, physio, insomnia, sex, money, football, film sets, festivals and family.The song ‘Are You with Me Now?’ was a regular soundtrack to the drives Hanif and partner Isabella would take from Rome to her mother’s house on the Amalfi Coast, both of them singing along as they skirted the Bay of Naples, in the time before the accident which paralysed him.This book takes its title from that music – and it is a question that has now become more urgent and more complex. Beginning with this memory of the past and ending with his marriage to Isabella and his first faltering steps, Hanif Kureishi, with son Carlo, charts how a writer, a couple and a family adapt to disability – through arguments and jokes, memories of lovers and friends, and a new way of working word by word at the kitchen table.Are You With Me Now? is a fiercely funny, unflinching account of survival – and of creativity, desire and companionship persisting when the body, and conventional life, fall apart.

Set over the course of a summer weekend in the country, Sleep With Me is a fast-moving, tragi-comic satire, exposing the emotionally and sexually chaotic lives of a group of friends.'They're all coming apart . . . attacking one another . . . Affairs and heartbreak - most of the people I know. No one knows how to make themselves or anyone else happy. Marriage hardly seems worth the trouble.'Sleep With Me premièred at the Royal National Theatre in April 1999.

'My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.'As the teenage hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel, Karim is desperate to escape suburban South London and experience the forbidden fruits which the 1970s seem to offer. When the unlikely opportunity of a life in the theatre announces itself, he starts to win the sort of attention he has been craving, albeit with some rude and raucous results.

The Black Album is the second novel by Hanif Kureishi, one of the most praised and influential writers of our times. It is set in London in 1989, the year after the second acid-fuelled 'summer of love' - also the year in which the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his infamous fatwa upon Salman Rushdie.The Black Album is a portrait of a young Asian man being pulled in conflicting directions: one way by the lure of sexual and hallucinogenic hedonism, another by the austere certitudes of Islam. Shahid Hasan, a clean-cut kid from the provinces, comes to London after the death of his father. He makes his home in a Kilburn bedsit, falls in love with postmodernist college lecturer Deedee Osgood, and soon finds himself passionately embroiled in a spiritual battle between liberalism and fundamentalism.

Jamal Khan, a psychoanalyst in his fifties living in London, is haunted by memories of his teens: his first love, Ajita; the exhilaration of sex, drugs and politics; and a brutal act of violence which changed his life for ever. As he and his best friend Henry attempt to make the sometimes painful, sometimes comic transition to their divorced middle age, balancing the conflicts of desire and dignity, Jamal's teenage traumas make a shocking reappearance in his present life.'A great comic writer and a peerless connoisseur of the human mystery.' Independent'A novel that describes with such elegant seriousness the fear of ageing, the inanition of pleasure, the survival of love, the longing to understand and be understood.' Sunday Telegraph'A vital, teeming, panoramic, immersive novel.' Time Out'There is more that is worth thinking about in Something to Tell You than in the work of almost any other current British novelist.' Evening Standard

The protagonist of Hanif Kureishi's delightful novel is Gabriel, a fifteen-year-old North London schoolboy trying to come to terms with a new life, after the equilibrium of his family home has been shattered by the ousting of his father.Fending for himself, as well as providing emotional support to his confused (and confusing) parents, Gabriel is forced to grow up quickly. The only support he can draw upon is from his remembered twin brother, Archie, and from his own 'gift', which is accompanied by sensations that urge him into areas of life requiring the utmost courage and faith. A chance visit to seventies rock star Lester Jones crystallizes the turbulent emotions inside Gabriel, and helps him to recognize and engage with his gift . . .'A charming, light-textured fable about talent, about how single-minded creativity might embrace and even be buoyed by the heartbreaking muddle of everyday life.' Observer

Over the course of the last 12 years, Hanif Kureishi has written short fiction. The stories are, by turns, provocative, erotic, tender, funny and charming as they deal with the complexities of relationships as well as the joys of children.This collection contains his controversial story Weddings and Beheadings, a well as his prophetic My Son the Fanatic, which exposes the religious tensions within the muslim family unit. As with his novels and screenplays, Kureishi has his finger on the pulse of the political tensions in society and how they affect people's everyday lives.

Religion is for the benefit of the masses, not for brain-box types like you. Those simpletons require strict rules for living, otherwise they would still think the earth sits on three fishes. But you mind-wallahs must know it's a lot of balls.An Asian kid from Kent goes to college in London and teams up with a sympathetic group of anti-racists. But it's 1989, the year of the fatwa, and as Shahid begins a hedonistic affair with his lecturer, his radical Muslim friends want to steer him away from the decadence of the West.We're not blasted Christians. We don't turn the other buttock. We will fight for our people who are being tortured anywhere - in Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir, East End!Hanif Kureishi's witty stage adaptation of his strikingly prescient and acclaimed novel, The Black Album, humorously considers how the events of 1989 have shaped today's world, where fundamentalism battles liberalism.A co-production with Tara Arts, The Black Album premiered at the National Theatre, London, in July 2009.

Over the course of the last 12 years, Hanif Kureishi has written short fiction. The stories are, by turns, provocative, erotic, tender, funny and charming as they deal with the complexities of relationships as well as the joys of children.This collection contains his controversial story Weddings and Beheadings, a well as his prophetic My Son the Fanatic, which exposes the religious tensions within the muslim family unit. As with his novels and screenplays, Kureishi has his finger on the pulse of the political tensions in society and how they affect people's everyday lives.

Love in a Blue Time is a brilliant collection of stories by the bestselling author of The Buddha of Suburbia. This time, Hanif Kureishi's subject is the difficult, serious business of love - and hate. His stories have all the qualities of his novels: they are funny, inventive, bawdy, and aggressively contemporary. The characters that stride out of the pages of Love in a Blue Time, however damaged, deranged or despicable, are united by one thing: they are all creatures of strong desire.'In this haunting, troubling collection of short stories, Hanif Kureishi has finally embraced the decadence that has lain in wait for him . . . A tense, desolate and consuming collection.' Observer'The whole collection buzzes with anger and angst.' Time Out

'It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.'Jay is leaving his partner and their two sons. As the long night before his departure unfolds he remembers the ups and downs of his relationship with Susan. In an unforgettable, and often pitiless, reflection of their time together he analyses the agonies and the joys of trying to make a life with another person.

The stories in Midnight All Day show a contemporary master at the top of his form, acclaimed by one reviewer for his depiction of 'a lost generation of men: those shaped by the sixties, disoriented by the eighties and bereft of a personal and political map in the nineties'.We are unerring in our choice of lovers, particularly when we require the wrong person. There is an instinct, magnet or aerial which seeks the unsuitable. The wrong person is, of course, right for something - to punish, bully, or humiliate us, let us down, leave us for dead,or, worst of all, give us the impression that they are not inappropriate, but almost right, thus hanging us in love's limbo. Not just anyone can do this.In this astonishing collection of stories, Hanif Kureishi confirms his reputation as Britain's foremost chronicler of the loveless, the lost and the dispossessed. The characters in Midnight All Day are familiar to all of us: frustrated and intoxicated, melancholic and sensitive, yet capable of great cruelty, and, if necessary, willing to break the constraints of an old life to make way for the new.

This collection begins in the early 1980s with The Rainbow Sign, which was written as the Introduction to the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette. It allowed Kureishi to expand upon the issues raised by the film : race, class, sexuality - issues that were provoked by his childhood and family situation. In the ensuing decades, he has developed these initial ideas, especially as the issue of Islam's relation to the West has become one of the burning issues of the time.Kureishi shows how flexible a form the essay can be - as intellectual as Sontag or Adam Phillips, as informal and casual as Max Beerbohm, as cool and minimalist as Joan Didion, or as provocative as Norman Mailer. As with his fictional work, these essays display Kureishi's ability to capture the temper of the times.

Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse PrizeMamoon is an eminent Indian-born writer who has made a career in England - but now, in his early 70s, his reputation is fading, sales have dried up, and his new wife has expensive taste.Harry, a young writer, is commissioned to write a biography to revitalise both Mamoon's career and his bank balance. Harry greatly admires Mamoon's work and wants to uncover the truth of the artist's life. Harry's publisher seeks a more naked truth, a salacious tale of sex and scandal that will generate headlines. Meanwhile Mamoon himself is mining a different vein of truth altogether.Harry and Mamoon find themselves in a battle of wills, but which of them will have the last word?The ensuing struggle for dominance raises issues of love and desire, loyalty and betrayal, and the frailties of age versus the recklessness of youth.Hanif Kureishi has created a tale brimming with youthful exuberance, as hilarious as it is touching, where words have the power to forge a world.

In Le Weekend, a couple - married for 30 years - spend their wedding anniversary in Paris. However, the romantic city soon becomes a backdrop to their increasingly bitter disputes about the state of their marriage - and their lives.But, as they gradually become part of the rhythm of the city - its cafes and monuments - the tension that has burdened them fades as they re-discover the playfulness and anarchy of their youth.Their melancholy dissolves in a sense of delight in irresponsibility, and gives them a new lease of life

'Hanif Kureishi's literary memoir explores his relationship with his father, a failed writer. Kurieshi is, of course, hugely successful...' Esquire'This is an ambitious book. Kureshi - free-associating with what feels like unmitigated honesty - successfully conveys the impression that in this book he has actually given us himself.' Sunday Times'Deeply involving, highly intelligent and, in what it doesn't say rather than what it does, profoundly sad.' Evening Standard'I don't think he has done anything as good, in any medium, as this moving and fiercely honest book.' Guardian

'Kureishi's screenplay is one of his most focused and engaging since My Beautiful Laundrette.' Allan Hunter, Screen InternationalAt sixty-five years of age, May fears that life has passed her by - that she has become just another invisible old lady whose days are more or less numbered. When she and her husband travel down from the north to visit their grown-up children in west London, she finds them characteristically inattentive. But then her husband's unexpected death pulls the ground from under her, and she subsequently embarks on a passionate affair with Darren, a man half her age, who is renovating her son's house and sleeping with her daughter, Paula. In the midst of this tumultuous situation, May begins to understand that it can take a lifetime to feel truly alive.

Over the past 10 years Hanif Kureishi has charted the gradual widening of the gulf between fundamentalist Islam and Western values. Starting with THE BLACK ALBUM, Kureishi portrayed the ongoing argument between Islam and Western liberal values, between Islamic certainty and Western rational scepticism. By the time he was writing the short sotry, MY SON THE FANATIC, the break was complete - there was no longer any attempt by the fundmentalists to find any common ground with Western culture.The outbreak of the Iraq war and its aftermath, plus the recent bombings in London, have stimulated Kureishi to write further about this great divide between the East and the West, and this volume collects Kureishi's writings from the past 10 years which have have dealt with this subject, charting Islam's disengangemnt from dialogue with the West.The volume also contains a new piece, written especially for this book, which brings Kureishi's analysis of the situation right up to date.

With VENUS, Hanif Kureishi turns his piercing gaze onto the pains of old age. Maurice (Peter O'Toole) and Ian (Leslie Phillips) are veteran stage actors whose slow, inevitable decline is disrupted by the arrival in their lives of Ian's niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker). While Jessie's housekeeping skills make for a bone of contention with Ian, Maurice finds himself attracted to her. Kureishi has crafted a disturbing, wry and profoundly moving swansong for his characters. Also included in this volume is an Introduction by Kureishi in which he describes the inspiration he drew from the Japanese master Tanizaki.