Cultural Histories at Kingston: an audience with Hanif Kureishi

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Time: 7.00pm - 9.00pm
Venue: Clattern Lecture Theatre, Penrhyn Road campus, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE
Price: free
Speaker(s): Hanif Kureishi

Join us as we welcome Hanif Kureishi, acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and novelist, to read from his Whitbread Award-winning novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The novel has been translated into 20 languages and was also made into a four-part drama series by the BBC, with a soundtrack by David Bowie.

The reading will be followed by an interview with the author, an audience question and answer session and a wine reception. Hanif Kureishi is the author of novels (including The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album and Intimacy), story collections (Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day, The Body), plays (including Outskirts, Borderline and Sleep With Me), and screenplays (including My Beautiful Laundrette, My Son the Fanatic and Venus). Among his other publications are the collection of essays Dreaming and Scheming, The Word and the Bomb and the memoir My Ear at His Heart.

Kureishi was born in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother. His father, Rafiushan, was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. He came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies. After meeting and marrying Kureishi's mother Audrey, Rafiushan settled in Bromley, where Kureishi was born, and worked at the Pakistan Embassy.

Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School where David Bowie had also been a pupil and after taking his A levels at a local sixth form college, he spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University before dropping out. Later he attended King's College London and took a degree in philosophy. In 1985 he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980's London for a film directed by Stephen Frears. It won the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.

Kureishi is married and has a pair of twins and a younger son.

For further information about this event:

Contact: Lucy Williams
Email: l.williams@kingston.ac.uk