Hanif Kureishi is the author of novels (including The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album and Intimacy), story collections (Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day, The Body), plays (including Outskirts, Borderline and Sleep With Me), and screenplays (including My Beautiful Laundrette, My Son the Fanatic and Venus). Among his other publications are the collection of essays Dreaming and Scheming, The Word and the Bomb and the memoir My Ear at His Heart.
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 India in 1947. He came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies. After meeting and marrying Kureishi’s mother Audrey, Rafiushan settled in Bromley, where Kureishi was born, and worked at the Pakistan Embassy.
Kureishi 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. In 1985 he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980’s 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.
Books in order of publication:
Novels
1990 The Buddha of Suburbia, London: Faber and Faber
1995 The Black Album, London: Faber and Faber
1998 Intimacy, London: Faber and Faber
2001 Gabriel’s Gift, London: Faber and Faber
2003 The Body, London: Faber and Faber
2008 Something to Tell You, London: Faber and Faber
2014 The Last Word, London: Faber and Faber
2017 The Nothing, London: Faber and Faber
2019 What Happened?, London: Faber and Faber
Story collections
1997 Love in a Blue Time, London: Faber and Faber
1999 Midnight All Day, London: Faber and Faber
1999 “She Said, He Said”, The New Yorker
Collection of stories and essays
2011 Collected Essays, Faber and Faber
2015 Love + Hate: Stories and Essays, Faber & Faber
Plays and screenplays
1980 The King and Me, London: Faber and Faber
1981 Outskirts, London: Faber and Faber
1981 Borderline, London: Faber and Faber
1983 Birds of Passage, London: Faber and Faber
1988 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, London: Faber and Faber
1991 London Kills Me, London: Faber and Faber
1996 My Beautiful Laundrette and other writings, London: Faber and Faber
1997 My Son the Fanatic, London: Faber and Faber
1999 Hanif Kureishi Plays One, London: Faber and Faber
1999 Sleep with Me, London: Faber and Faber
2002 Collected Screenplays Volume I, London: Faber and Faber
2003 The Mother, London: Faber and Faber
2004 When The Night Begins, London: Faber and Faber
2007 Venus, London: Faber and Faber
2009 The Black Album (adapted from the novel), London: Faber and Faber
Nonfiction
2002 Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics, London: Faber and Faber
2004 My Ear at His Heart, London: Faber and Faber
2005 The Word and the Bomb , London: Faber and Faber
2014 A Theft: My Con Man , London: Faber and Faber
2024 Shattered: A Memoir, London: Penguin
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