Show 18: the playwright, screenwriter and novelist on Something to Tell You...
Playwright, screenwriter, novelist and film-maker Hanif Kureishi was born in Bromley, Kent in 1954 to a Pakistani father and English mother. Hanif attended Bromley Technical High School and, after dropping out of Lancaster University, he read philosophy at King's College, London.
He started out by writing pornography under the pseudonym Antonia French before his first play, Soaking the Heat, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976. This was followed in 1980 by The Mother Country, for which he won the Thames TV Playwright Award. In 1981 his play Outskirts won the George Devine Award and in 1982 he became Writer in Residence at the Royal Court Theatre.
His screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, was nominated for the Best Screenplay Oscar, and was critically acclaimed for its sensitive depiction of a homosexual relationship between a gay skinhead and a young Asian man. He also wrote a number of subsequent films, plays and screenplays, including Sammy and Rosie Get Laid; London Kills Me; My Son the Fanatic; Sleep With Me and When the Night Begins.
Kureishi's first novel was the semi-autobiographical The Buddha of Suburbia, published in 1990. Karim, the novel's young hero ('an Englishman born and bred - almost'), like Kureishi, has a Pakistani father and an English mother. The novel describes Karim's struggle for social and sexual identity, a comic coming-of-age novel and a satirical portrait of race relations in Britain during the 1970s. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was produced by the BBC in 1993 as a four-part television series, with David Bowie providing a song of the same name.
Since then, his writing has been prolific. His second novel, The Black Album (1995), explores some of the issues facing the Muslim community living in Britain in the 1980s. Love in a Blue Time, his first collection of short stories, focuses on a series of characters working in the media. Intimacy, a novella which caused controversy on its publication in 1998, is a painful and explicit account of a man's decision to leave his partner and two young sons. It was adapted into a film, which also caused controversy due to its explicit sex scenes.
Since then, his work has included Gabriel's Gift (2001), the story of an artistic 15-year-old schoolboy; Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics, a non-fiction collection; The Mother, a drama which explores a cross-generation relationship between a grandmother and a married handyman half her age; the screenplay Venus; and My Ear at His Heart, a memoir of his father based on the discovery of an unfinished manuscript his father had written. His new novel, Something to Tell You, is out now.
Something to Tell You
Jamal is a successful psychoanalyst, haunted by his first love and an act of violence from which he can never escape. As he relives his coming of age in the 1970s, the past becomes a vivid backdrop to the drama developing thirty years later, as he and his circle of friends face encroaching middle age with the traumas and confusions of their youth still unresolved.
Like The Buddha of Suburbia, Something to Tell You is energetic, comic, and tender, exploring the tangled relationships between friends, lovers, siblings, parents and children. Kureishi has created an extraordinary cast of Londoners, all of whom wrestle with their own limits as human beings.
Image:© Sarah Lee