Born in Bromley in 1954 to an Indian father and white British mother, Kureishi's life is intimately bound up with the history of immigration and social change in Britain. This is the story of how a mixed-raced child of empire who attended the local comprehensive school found success with a remarkable series of novels and screenplays, including My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, Intimacy, Venus and Le Week-End. The book also illuminates a larger story, not only of the artist as a young man, but of the recasting of Britain in the aftermath of decolonisation.

Drawing on journals, letters and manuscripts from Kureishi's unexplored archive, recently acquired by the British Library, and informed by interviews with his family, friends and collaborators, as well with the writer himself, Ruvani Ranasinha sheds new light on how his life animates his work. This first biography offers a vivid portrait of a major talent who has inspired a new generation of writers.

Reviews

'This is a magnificent, meticulous and exhaustive biography, and one worthy of its mercurial subject.'
The Spectator

'Ranasinha succeeds in her aim of appearing definitive, while establishing Kureishi's significance to British cultural life of the past 50 years.'
The Times

'Ruvani Ranasinha's Hanif Kureishi: Writing the self is an illuminating biography; the fact that it is also a portrait of modern Britain is a tribute both to the scope of Kureishi's work and to the thoroughness of Ranasinha's research.'
The TLS

'Ruvani Ranasinha illuminates the life as well as the work of the beloved writer Hanif Kureishi. This well-researched and exhaustive biography has an aura of completeness.'
Amitava Kumar, author of A Time Outside This Time

'Ruvani Ranasinha's life of Hanif Kureishi is not just an impressively comprehensive portrait of the artist as a young man, it also provides an engrossing snapshot of his times. With insight and sympathy, Ranasinha captures a rare turning-point in the development of our literary tradition. For all the admirers of Kureishi and his work, this must be essential reading.'
Robert McCrum, author of The 100 Best Novels in English

Preface

Part One: Origins

Part Two: Plays

Part Three: Films

Part Four: Becoming a novelist

Part Five: Fathers and sons

Part Six: Private Lives, New Beginnings

Part Seven: The turn inwards: writing and psychoanalysis

Part Eight: Love and Hate

Part Nine: Late Style

Afterword

Author

Ruvani Ranasinha is Professor of Global Literature at King's College London. She is the author of Hanif Kureishi: Writers and Their Works (2002) and has written extensively on South-Asian fiction and writers. Born in Sri Lanka, she migrated to Britain with her parents at the age of one. She grew up in Epsom in Surrey, read English Literature at the University of Bristol and received her PhD from the University of Oxford. She lives in west London with her husband, daughter and son.