Hanif Kureishi was born in 1954 and grew up in Bromley, in London’s commuter belt, spending his early years above the grocery shop run by his maternal grandparents. His parents, Audrey Buss and Rafiushan Kureishi, had something of an unusual relationship in postwar Britain, as a white working-class Englishwoman and an Indian civil servant at London’s Pakistani embassy. Kureishi started writing as a teenager and by his twenties had come to the notice of the Royal Court Theatre, which staged several of his plays, works that dealt with the British Asian experience, a subject barely represented at the time. In 1987, his debut screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), was nominated for an Academy Award and became one of the most celebrated British films of the decade; the story of a…
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The Paris Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, Winter 2024 (250)