Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi is a British playwright, screenwriter and novelist, born in Bromley in 1954 to a Pakistani father and an English mother. He studied philosophy at King's College London and began writing plays for the Royal Court in the 1970s.

His screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) earned an Academy Award nomination, and his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His other novels include The Black Album and Intimacy, and he wrote the memoirs My Ear at His Heart and Shattered. He was appointed CBE in 2008.