This is the first biography of Hanif Kureishi, one of the most provocative, versatile and popular British writers of his generation. Drawing on Kureishi's unexplored personal archive, recently acquired by the British Library, each chapter recounts a decade of his life and illuminates the work he produced within the period. This structure reflects the novelist's own preoccupation with self-reinvention and the fluidity of identity: 'Every decade you become someone else.' With his vivid evocations of marginalised subjects, Kureishi has redefined images of British identity. At the same time, he has explored key issues such as Thatcherism, terrorism, race, class and sexuality. Entering his mid-sixties, he is only beginning to reflect on a lifetime's cultural production that includes award-winning screenplays, novels, plays, essays and short-stories, written between the early eighties and the first decades of the twenty-first century.