Hanif Kureishi – författare

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.

Hanif Kureishi's cinematic storytelling embraces a wide spectrum of characters from all classes and nationalities, depicting them with compassion, humour and relish, though never fighting shy of controversy. This volume comprises four of Kureishi's screenplays.My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)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.Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)1980s London, and Sammy and Rosie share an 'open' marriage, strings of lovers, and a bohemian existence amidst inner-city turmoil. Sammy's father, Rafi, formerly a government minister in India, visits London as racial tensions rise with the death of a woman in a police raid. Rafi offers Sammy financial assistance if the couple will leave their 'war zone' behind them and produce grandchildren. But Rafi's own shady past threatens to haunt him.London Kills Me (1991)A weekend in the lives of homeless Clint and his pal Muffdiver, youthful veterans of the streets of London, whose chief source of income derives from selling drugs to the wealthier denizens of Notting Hill. But what Clint wants more than anything else is a proper job, and he's been promised a position as a waiter in a restaurant - on the condition that he can come up with a pair of 'sensible' shoes.My Son the Fanatic (1997)Parvez is a Pakistani cab driver in a northern industrial town who chauffeurs young prostitute Bettina. Their gentle friendship grows more tender as Parvez's home life starts to crumble, his son Farid embracing a fundamentalist sect of Islam and rejecting his father's values. When Farid then involves himself with a group committed to purging the town of corruption, Parvez is compelled to choose where his loyalties lie.

'Hanif Kureishi's literary memoir explores his relationship with his father, a failed writer. Kurieshi is, of course, hugely successful...' EsquireAmongst a batch of papers, Hanif Kureishi discovered an abandoned manuscript - a novel, written by his father. And so begins a journey which takes him through his father's childhood by the sea in India to an adult life in the suburbs of Bromley. My Ear at His Heart offers remarkable insight into Hanif Kureishi's literary calling, coming from the ashes of his father's own attempts years before. '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

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.

Mamoon is an eminent Indian-born writer who has made a career in England -- but now, in his early seventies, his reputation is fading, his book sales have dried up and his new wife has expensive tastes. Harry, a young writer, is commissioned to write a biography to revitalise Mamoon's career. He greatly admires Mamoon's work and wants to uncover the truth of the artist's life, but Harry's publisher seeks a more salacious tale of sex and scandal to generate headlines. Meanwhile, Mamoon himself is mining a different truth altogether -- but which one of them will have the last word?

"My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost..."The hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel is dreamy teenager Karim, 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, Karim starts to win the sort of attention he has been craving - albeit with some rude and raucous results. With the publication of Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi landed into the literary landscape as a distinct new voice and a fearless taboo-breaking writer. The novel inspired a ground-breaking BBC series featuring a soundtrack by David Bowie.

Hate skews reality even more than love.In the story of a Pakistani woman who has begun a new life in Paris, an essay about the writing of Kureishi's acclaimed film Le Week-End, and an account of Kafka's relationship with his father, readers will find Kureishi also exploring the topics that he continues to make new, and make his own: growing up and growing old; betrayal and loyalty; imagination and repression; marriage and fatherhood. The collection ends with a bravura piece of very personal reportage about the conman who stole Kureishi's life savings - a man who provoked both admiration and disgust, obsession and revulsion, love and hate.

Shahid is a clean-cut student, trying to make an impression on his college lecturer, Deedee Osgood, who gives his spirits a lift when she takes him to a naked rave party. Shahid's academic prospects are threatened by the intervention of his gangster brother Chili, who, with his Armani suits and Gucci loafers, moves into Shahid's bedsit as a hideout, bringing unnecessary danger and excitement with him. Set in London in 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin wall and the fatwah, The Black Album is a thriller with a characteristically lively background: raves, ecstasy, religious ferment and sexual passion in a dangerous time.

One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises growing louder. I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom which is next to mine.Waldo, a fêted filmmaker, is confined by old age and ill health to his London apartment. Frail and frustrated, he is cared for by his lovely younger wife, Zee. But when he suspects that Zee is beginning an affair with Eddie, 'more than an acquaintance and less than a friend for over thirty years,' Waldo is pressed to action: determined to expose the couple, he sets himself first to prove his suspicions correct - and then to enact his revenge.Written with characteristic black humour and with an acute eye for detail, Kureishi's eagerly awaited novella will have his readers dazzled once again by a brilliant mind at work.

Writing seems to be a problem of some kind. It isn't as if most people can just sit down and start to write brilliantly, get up from the desk, so something else all day, and then, next morning start again without any conflict or anxiety. To begin to write - to attempt to do anything creative, for that matter - is to ask many other questions, not only about the craft itself, but of oneself, and of life. The blank empty page is a representation of this helplessness. Who am I? it asks. How should I live? Who do I want to be?Dreaming and Scheming collects some of the very best of the non-fiction writings by Hanif Kureishi. These include political essays; diaries; accounts of his collaborations in film and television, and above all, exploration of how the life of the mind expresses itself in creative endeavours. Kureishi's energies and insights make this collection essential for admirers of his work, and for anyone who aspires to be a writer.

'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.

This provocative collection of short stories charts the growth of a generation from the liberating irreverence of the late 1970s to the dilemmas of responsibility and fidelity of the 1990s. The stories resonate with Hanif Kureishi's dead-on observations of human passion and folly, his brilliant depiction of seedy locales and magical characters, and his original, wicked sense of humour.

The Body is a dazzling collection of fiction from Hanif Kureishi, beginning with a novella that delves into the concept of identity, and its root in our physical being. Adam is a middle-aged playwright who accepts a tempting offer to have his mind transported into a younger body for six months. Youth restored, he embarks on an odyssey of physical hedonism, but must then face the dire consequences when he is loath to relinquish his new body . . .

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 return into his present life.

Mamoon is an eminent Indian-born writer who has made a career in England -- but now, in his early seventies, his reputation is fading, his book sales have dried up and his new wife has expensive tastes. Harry, a young writer, is commissioned to write a biography to revitalise Mamoon's career. He greatly admires Mamoon's work and wants to uncover the truth of the artist's life, but Harry's publisher seeks a more salacious tale of sex and scandal to generate headlines. Meanwhile, Mamoon himself is mining a different truth altogether -- but which one of them will have the last word?

Gabriel is 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, Gabriel is forced to grow up quickly. But a chance meeting with a seventies rock star crystallises the turbulent emotions inside Gabriel, and helps him to recognise and engage with his rare gift . . .

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 us all: frustrated and intoxicated, melancholic and sensitive, yet capable of great cruelty.

'No one else casts such a shrewd and gimlet eye on contemporary life.' - William BoydComic, dark and insightful, What Happened? is Hanif Kureishi's new collection of essays and fiction. No topic is too fringe or too mainstream for this insatiable-and much-loved-author. From social media to the ancient classics, from appraisals of David Bowie to Georges Simenon to Keith Jarrett, this is the latest literary 'event' in a unique body of work that displays Kureishi's characteristic boundless curiosity and wit. What Happened? is as much about the very fact of Kureishi's catholic appetite for culture as his observations and insights themselves, and any new book in his oeuvre is a justification for celebration.