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Hanif Kureishi
(December 5, 1954 - living) Pakistan - U.K.

Hanif Kureishi

Novelist, screenwriter

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Kureishi was born in London, to a Pakistani father and a British mother. He attended Bromley Tech and King's College, London.

Kureishi wrote several moderately successful plays for the Royal Court Theater - The King and Me (1980), The Mother Country (1980), Outskirts (1981, which won the George Devine Drama Award), Borderline (1981), and Birds of Passage (1983) - but first gained international prominence with his screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). Not only was the film a commercial success, the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.

Kureishi's subsequent screenplays include Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988), London Kills Me (1991), and My Son the Fanatic (1997), which is based on a short story from his 1997 collection, Love in a Blue Time. Kureishi's novels include The Buddha of Suburbia (1991), which won the George Whitbread Prize; The Black Album (1995); and Intimacy (1998).

Gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals regularly play significant roles in Kureishi's work. For example, the relationship between Omar and Johnny is central to My Beautiful Laundrette; the lesbians in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid are crucial subsidiary characters; and in The Buddha of Suburbia, protagonist Karim's simultaneous desire for and identification with Charlie is as strong as his bonds with any of the women in the text, and his adolescent sexual experimentation with Charlie is represented both erotically and comically.

Rather than treating homosexuality as the concern of a discrete minority, Kureishi uses same-sex relationships to explore the contradictions of history and national identity in postcolonial Britain.

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Source: and article by: Stephen da Silva

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