Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self: a Biography

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

From the global successes of My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, through to late masterpieces such as The Nothing, Hanif Kureishi is one of Britains most popular and versatile writers.

Drawing on Kureishis unexplored personal archive, recently acquired by the British Library, each chapter in Ruvani Ranashinas jaw-droppingly honest biography recounts a decade of the authors life, illuminating the work he produced in each period. This structure reflects the novelist and screenwriters own preoccupation with self-reinvention and the fluidity of identity: Every decade you become someone else.

Kureishi has redefined British identity, exploring key issues such as Thatcherism, terrorism, race, class, and sexuality. Hanif Kureishi Writing the self: A biography is a tour-de-force, exploring for the first time this provocative artist. Looking at his novels, including Intimacy and the Black Album, short stories, and screenplays the Mother and Venus, and his collaborations with such figures as David Bowie, Roger Michell and Stephen Frears, Ranashini analyses this sometime controversial figure with wit and empathy.

Reviews

'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 -- .

Author Bio

Ruvani Ranasinha is Professor of Global Literature at Kings College London. She is the author of Hanif Kureishi: Writers and Their Works (2002), South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (2007) and Contemporary South Asian Womens Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (2016).