Hanif Kureishi (born 5 December 1954) is a British playwright, screenwriter and novelist.
He wrote the screenplay for Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), earning Academy Award and BAFTA Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. He is also known for his novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which was adapted into a four-part BBC drama series.
Following a spinal injury in 2022, he wrote Shattered (2024) to wide acclaim. The book was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
He was born in Bromley to an English mother, Audrey Buss, and a father, Rafiushan (Shanoo) Kureishi, who had left India in his early twenties; Kureishi has written that his father worked for much of his adult life at the Pakistan embassy in London, and that the family background was shaped by the 1947 Partition.
His father was from a wealthy family based in Madras (now Chennai), whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. Rafiushan's father was a colonel and doctor in the British Indian Army. Rafiushan attended the Cathedral School in Bombay (now Mumbai), the same school attended by Salman Rushdie. The family was later close to the Bhuttos. Rafiushan's brother (Hanif's uncle), Omar Kureishi, was a newspaper columnist and manager of the Pakistan cricket team.
Rafiushan travelled to the UK in 1950 to study law, but ran out of money and took a desk job at the Pakistani high commission instead. There he met his wife-to-be, Audrey Buss. He wanted to be a writer but his ambitions were frustrated, with his submissions to publishers turned down.
Hanif Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School and studied for A-levels at Bromley College of Technology. While at this college, he was elected student union president in 1972. Some of the characters from his semi-autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia are drawn from this period.
He spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University, then withdrew. He later attended King's College London and earned a degree in philosophy.
Kureishi started his career in the 1970s as a pornography writer, under the pseudonyms Antonia French and Karim.
He went on to write plays for the Hampstead Theatre, Soho Poly, and by the age of 18, was with the Royal Court.
He wrote My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980s London, for a film directed by Stephen Frears. The screenplay's depiction of racist hostility drew on Kureishi's own experiences of racism at school; he has said that he was "literally the only brown person" at his high school and was subjected to racist abuse.
The film won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
He also wrote the screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987).
His novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel and was later adapted into a BBC television serial, with a soundtrack composed by David Bowie.
In 1991, his feature film London Kills Me, which he wrote and directed, was released.
Kureishi's novel Intimacy (1998) follows a man preparing to leave his partner and their two young children after feeling emotionally and physically rejected. The novel attracted controversy and was widely read as at least semi-autobiographical, in light of reports that Kureishi had recently left his then partner, Tracey Scoffield, and their twin sons.
In 2001, Kureishi's work was adapted into the film Intimacy, directed by Patrice Chéreau; the film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, and its lead actor Kerry Fox received the Silver Bear for Best Actress.
The book was translated into Persian by Niki Karimi; a Persian-language edition (Nzdiky) is catalogued as published in Tehran by Tofiq Afrin in 1383 (2004–2005).