In 2014, reflecting on his career to date, Hanif Kureishi remarked to an interviewer that the great thing about being a writer is that “every ten years you become somebody else”. Between the mid-1970s and early-1980s he served his apprenticeship, writing dirty stories for pornographic magazines and plays for the Royal Court. The mid-1980s marked a new phase, when he wrote the screenplay for the Stephen Frears Oscar-nominated film My Beautiful Launderette (1985), and peaked with the tremendous commercial and critical success of his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia , published in 1990.
Three years later it was filmed by the BBC with a David Bowie soundtrack. Kureishi was the cool new voice of multicultural Britain. The birth of twin boys marked the beginning of a third, more difficult period, perhaps best captured by the short, claustrophobic novel Intimacy (1998), which traps the reader in the mind of a man steeling himself to leave his wife and children – echoing Kureishi himself, who had left the mother of his children not long before the book was published.
In the subsequent decade he continued to produce a considerable variety and volume of work – novels, stories, essays, screenplays – but somewhat removed from the spotlight; taken, after so long, for granted. In 2013 he was defrauded of his life savings. Later that year he took up a creative writing professorship at Kingston University.
On Boxing Day 2022 another phase began, both in Kureishi’s life and his.