Beautiful life

One of Britain’s best-known Anglo-Asian writers tells David Kernek that, unlike many of his fictional creations, he’s a happy man.

ONCE upon a time, back in the 20th century, Hanif Kureishi wrote his way into British literature with sparkling tales — screenplays, short stories and novels that were in part autobiographical — of rebellion, racism, rock ’n’ roll, recreational drugs, sex and relationships as durable as a match flame in a hurricane.

He was an angry, hedonistic young Anglo-Asian man whose early works, My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, chronicled the lives of first and second generation Pakistani and Indian immigrants as they laboured to survive and prosper in the wastelands of suburban south London.