Hanif Kureishi on rage, resilience and the ‘long work of carrying on’

{"text":[[{"start":9.74,"text":"Hanif Kureishi has written more than 20 plays and screenplays, eight novels and novellas, four non-fiction books and seven collections of stories and essays, but he’s still stumped by the lunch menu."}],[{"start":19.86,"text":"“On every sentence on this page is a word I don’t understand,” he says, as he scans the River Cafe’s offerings."}],[{"start":26.82,"text":"When I arrive, he’s already seated on the outdoor terrace with a cappuccino and is enjoying a complimentary pizzetta with gorgonzola and fig. I catch up by ordering a fresh lemonade."}],[{"start":37.46,"text":"We’re dining at the popular west London restaurant Kureishi has frequented for decades in his many guises: as the Royal Court Theatre usher turned Oscar-nominated screenwriter of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985); the novelist who found fame with hit debut The Buddha of Suburbia (1990); the incisive essayist on race, class and psychology; the father of three sons with two ex-partners. Now 71 and recently married, he sits at a table with his son Carlo, who is here to assist with eating — a fall on Boxing Day in 2022 turned Kureishi tetraplegic overnight."}],[{"start":70.02,"text":"But right now, the most pressing concern is lunch. “What is a girolle, G-I-R-O-L-L-E?” he asks. I sense he’s enjoying the pretend ignorance."}],[{"start":81.12,"text":"That’s one I actually know. I think it’s a mushroom."}],[{"start":82.54,"text":"“OK, thank you for that.” His voice is resonant and slightly plummy. “The food here is delicious though, it’s really nice. Also, it’s a lovely day.” It is. The October sun is warm. Kureishi is wearing blocky sunglasses that hide his eyes. We order food quickly: starters, pasta and a fish course to share."}],[{"start":101.28,"text":"“I got married here last year.” He nods to the private dining room. “It was really lovely, sunny like this, and then Elton John came.”"}],[{"start":109.1,"text":"“I’d never met him before. I invited him randomly: I thought, fuck it, why not?”"}],[{"start":114.98,"text":"“This huge cherry-red Bentley came into the drive . . . and out got Elton John, wearing a pink suit and purple sunglasses. Fucking amazing,” he swears for emphasis, making the word sound luxurious."}],[{"start":126.94,"text":"What did he say? “He’d read my book, Shattered, so he wanted to know how I was, how I wrote, how I functioned, how I managed to remain creative. And then he talked about his health problems.” I strain to hear Kureishi as a plane drones above. We appear to be sitting under a flight path."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":143.18,"text":"“He’s nearly blind and he still wants to perform . . . despite being disabled, you’ve got to continue doing what you do, because otherwise you lose your identity.”"}],[{"start":152.64,"text":"The 2025 book of memoir-essays depicts the aftermath of Kureishi’s fall: the reality of becoming paralysed, the eternity spent in hospital, how relationships change overnight. “If the first book was about shock and survival,” he writes in Are You with Me Now?, which is published next month, “this one is about the long work of carrying on.”"}],[{"start":172.68,"text":"My lemonade arrives — and zings. Kureishi prompts Carlo to lift his cappuccino cup. Elton John is one of his many starry encounters. There appears to have been a lot of glamour across his life."}],[{"start":184.06,"text":"“I used to come up on the train from Bromley and I would go, as a kid, straight to the King’s Road and walk up and down, seeing how everybody dressed. It was a parade in the late ’60s, people showing off. And I thought . . . this is where I want to be.”"}],[{"start":198.68,"text":"An inciting force then, suburban existence and London just there for him, waiting . . ."}],[{"start":203.82,"text":"“There are three things about the suburbs. One, it was incredibly racist in the ’70s, and the National Front was very active and you took your life in your hands if you were a brown person. Number two, suburbs were incredibly boring. Number three, the kids were really creative, there were a lot of bands, a lot of fashion and dressing up, there was punk, there were skinheads, there were rockers, all those things at once, which I wrote about in The Buddha of Suburbia.”"}],[{"start":231.42,"text":"Kureishi has a great ear for comic dialogue. His novels tend to set a motley cast of characters in scenarios where he can skewer racial or class politics, all while paying close attention to place and his protagonists’ inner turmoil. Buddha was a bestselling sensation, which painted a multicultural London as-yet-unseen in fiction, centring on Karim, a bisexual English-Indian teenager, aimless yet falling headfirst into the exciting life he longs for. The comparisons to Kureishi’s adolescence are hard to miss — and ones he admits, although he concedes that “the book makes the suburbs sound like Hollywood in the ’80s”."}],[{"start":268.68,"text":"Kureishi seems fond of deploying artful echoes from life that fuel the reality of the work. With a vast oeuvre, the crossovers are easier to spot: in Are You with Me Now? he writes: “My twin brother, who apparently died at birth, would have been called Karim” — the same name as Buddha’s protagonist. In his 2008 novel Something to Tell You, the psychoanalyst-protagonist Jamal travels to Pakistan with his sister. He discovers his uncle’s library, where the books are worm-riddled, musty and — “disintegrating, yeah”, Kureishi completes the image."}],[{"start":299.8,"text":"And he’s also written about that trip, with the same detail, in his non-fiction."}],[{"start":300.3,"text":"“Have I? Really?” He pauses. “You’ve read all the stuff, bloody hell.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":308.48,"text":"Our starters arrive — Carlo squeezes lemon over Kureishi’s fritto misto. “Oh, wow.” Paper-thin slices of beef drape across Carlo’s plate like a napkin. My tuft of mozzarella is accompanied by tomatoes and a puréed sauce I later learn is chickpeas."}],[{"start":325.52,"text":"“When me and Carlo wrote Shattered, that really was a direct attempt on those days to write about what happened to me yesterday.” The book was mainly written by dictation in hospital. It fulfilled a different purpose: re-establishing his identity."}],[{"start":340.08,"text":"“Waking up one day to find out you’re tetraplegic: it’s completely devastating and sort of unbelievable . . . ” he pauses for a plane to cross overhead. “The writing was an attempt to reconstitute myself as a person, as opposed to a body that was severely damaged and would never recover. To try and work out what that means, and who I am.”"}],[{"start":360.12,"text":"“I can’t use my hands, I can’t type, so writing has become more direct, less playful and less poetic.”"}],[{"start":367.18,"text":"It still seems playful to me, I say. I carve a forkful of mozzarella. I’m actually impressed by the continuity of voice, humour . . ."}],[{"start":375.36,"text":"“Is that in there?” he says. “Despite your efforts to eradicate it, Carlo, you see. Something of me survives . . . ”"}],[{"start":382.2,"text":"But seriously. “It’s really fun writing with somebody else.” There’s the cliché of writing as a solitary act but now even getting the words down is a collaboration. Does that make the writing more robust?"}],[{"start":393.52,"text":"“Carlo says, and indeed he was saying it a couple of hours ago, ‘Oh that sentence is really dead,’ ‘That sentence is not doing anything,’ ‘That word is redundant, can’t you think of a better word?’”"}],[{"start":404.04,"text":"Is it really that bad?"}],[{"start":405.56,"text":"“Yeah.” Carlo jumps in to defend himself and Kureishi laughs in a satisfying and genuine three-word burst, “ha, ha, ha”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":412.04,"text":"They agree that it’s hard to find new experiences; Kureishi is more confined. “Are You with Me Now? was really about what it’s like to leave hospital as a disabled person. It’s horrific, the first time you leave your house in a wheelchair and go down to Tesco’s, a journey you’ve made hundreds of thousands of times in your normal life. But you feel all those people who work on the checkouts all fucking staring at you, thinking, what’s happened to him? . . . you feel ashamed.”"}],[{"start":439.84,"text":"Shame and humiliation recur in his recent writing — the consequences of someone else being in charge of his body. “It’s a terrible impatience that you have. I was lying in bed this morning, and there were two carers, and they were washing me and cleaning me, getting me dressed and talking to each other . . . And you’re lying there thinking, just fucking get on with it . . . your rage about your condition is terrible.”"}],[{"start":462.68,"text":"What does he do with the rage?"}],[{"start":464.72,"text":"“I remember discussing this with Salman Rushdie [who was attacked the same year as Kureishi’s accident], and he said, ‘Well, you have to learn to be patient.’ And I think of that when I’m lying there . . . there’s a lot of rage about your lack of agency, your impotence, your failure all the time, the fact that you’re a burden. He has to feed me.” Carlo has been nimbly helping Kureishi eat his calamari, waiting for pauses or for Kureishi to consent to mouthfuls."}],[{"start":465.22,"text":"“He doesn’t mind feeding me, he likes to feed me.”"}],[{"start":465.72,"text":"“No, I don’t,” Carlo says, locating Kureishi’s sarcasm."}],[{"start":495.32,"text":"“No, he doesn’t. But he has to do that. You’re really asking a lot of other people.”"}],[{"start":501.16,"text":"I wonder about the contrast to his novels, which are characterised by this masculine, capering sense of freedom. His protagonists negotiate the world with energetic independence."}],[{"start":510.64,"text":"“I like the word ‘caper’. I’ve never used that, it’s a beautiful word. And I like that idea of capering around London, looking for adventures, getting into trouble.”"}],[{"start":520.96,"text":"The thing is, he says, returning us to now versus then, “I wasn’t in a rage until the other day. It all started the other day when I became disabled.”"}],[{"start":530.2,"text":"I’m struck by his language — “the other day”, four years in. A reality that is yet to settle. But on the flip side is his new, charged relationship to writing, which had begun to quieten. His last work of fiction was 2017’s The Nothing. His pull to writing had slackened."}],[{"start":547.4,"text":"“When I was a kid, I wrote with great energy because I wanted to write about what happened to me in school and in South London and being mixed race and my father being an immigrant, that seemed to me to be urgent. And then it ran down and I thought, well that’s OK, I can just enjoy my life now. And then I had the accident and the urge to write came back very strongly.”"}],[{"start":568.72,"text":"I’m reminded of a line from his essay “The Rainbow Sign” — “perhaps that is why I took to writing in the first place, to make strong feelings into weak feelings”. His writing has channelled identity, love, the impulses of youth; these fundamental, fizzy experiences. And then with the accident, something else arrived that needed to be calmed."}],[{"start":588.8,"text":"“I like that phrase, making stronger feelings weaker, but partly to do with the process of construction, of turning them into language, and turning them to a language that’s necessarily shared with other people. I mean, when you’re on the disabled ward, everyone’s in a wheelchair. And it’s rather cheering. You’re in a world of disablement.”"}],[{"start":607.9,"text":"In one encounter in his new book, he bumps into someone he knows who pats him on the head, clueless as to how to greet him. It’s an acute depiction of the clumsy inability to act normally in the face of disability."}],[{"start":618.96,"text":"“Well, there’s no etiquette . . . I thought it was a kind of laugh. It was also quite patronising to pat a disabled person on the head.” He laughs. “It’s quite funny.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":629.76,"text":"We’re interrupted by our pasta. “Oh, great,” he says. Carlo and I both have cute parcels of ricotta. Kureishi has pappardelle (with g-i-r-o-l-l-e)."}],[{"start":641,"text":"Shall we get a drink? “Can I have another cappuccino?” I order a glass of Pinot Bianco, along with Carlo."}],[{"start":648.12,"text":"The etiquette may be hit-and-miss but he tells me of the “incredible acts of generosity” he has experienced. He has written previously that this generosity has made him “wish I had been kinder”. Can he tell me more?"}],[{"start":660.48,"text":"“My dad was in hospital a lot. I spent a lot of my adolescence coming and going from hospital and I hated it. I hated being in the hospital, I hated sitting there, I hated my dad not being strong and capable . . . the whole thing really confused me.”"}],[{"start":675.12,"text":"His next cappuccino arrives like lightning, with a fresh stubby straw. The wine follows. My chair turned to Kureishi, eyes on him as he speaks — eloquent, contained — I realise I’m barely paying attention to anything else."}],[{"start":689.44,"text":"“I regret my lack of ability to communicate with him . . . I’ve managed to create a different relationship with my kids than my dad did with me.”"}],[{"start":697.26,"text":"As if on cue, Carlo asks quietly, “Can I taste your pasta, Dad?”"}],[{"start":702.28,"text":"I wonder whether he takes encouragement from his writing’s potential to shape perspectives on illness and disability. “I hope so, but I don’t do that deliberately, I write from the front line, as it were, from what’s going on inside me.”"}],[{"start":715.32,"text":"“But as a young man, capering about town,” he says, emphasising “capering” with enjoyment, “I never saw the world like that, so I write differently now.”"}],[{"start":722.72,"text":"He writes meaningfully about his relationship with his wife Isabella. “Her life changed in an instant,” he tells me. “Every night now, I scream in my sleep. I scream, I shout, I cry. I’m not aware of it at all . . . it’s quite common with trauma victims, you’ve got PTSD. Shakespeare writes about this a lot: the nights are the worst.”"}],[{"start":742.4,"text":"Our pasta plates are cleared. I introduce the topic of psychoanalysis, a long-held fascination of his. He’s been in analysis for, what, 30 years?"}],[{"start":751,"text":"“Yeah, I’m still not cured, but it’s coming along nicely.”"}],[{"start":754.64,"text":"Our John Dory fillet is set down. Carlo dishes up for himself and his dad. I take a wedge of the fish, along with some potatoes and a knot of greens. “Still after 30 years I have conversations with my analyst that surprise me,” he continues."}],[{"start":767.96,"text":"“You chatter away. And then he’ll say something that’s really shocking and that really wakes you up.”"}],[{"start":772.84,"text":"Has his analyst been helpful with writing? “The first book I wrote under analysis was The Black Album. Since then I’ve written a lot, and if I get stuck, or I get a block, he helps me get through.”"}],[{"start":783.72,"text":"“[Analysis] stops you getting stuck in your life. There are occasions when you get really stuck and you don’t know what to do, how to act . . . analysis keeps everything fluid.”"}],[{"start":792.94,"text":"Kureishi eats his potatoes; the John Dory is a crispy-skinned delight."}],[{"start":797.1,"text":"The Black Album was partly inspired by conversations Kureishi had with Islamic fundamentalists. He has spent decades observing the shifting tides of race, religion and class. What is his relationship to that novel now?"}],[{"start":809.36,"text":"“One of the things I realised when I was writing that book is how much politics comes out of grievance . . . people who feel they’ve been fucked about, they’ve been deprived or been humiliated, you can see that in history and you see that now.”"}],[{"start":820.88,"text":"Kureishi seems tired and says as much. “We’ll stop in a minute. Is that OK?”"}],[{"start":825.72,"text":"There’s a distance when he talks about his motivations for his novels, in contrast to the conviction with which he discusses his newer, diaristic work. “I’m not writing fiction again,” he says."}],[{"start":836.5,"text":"He sounds adamant. “We couldn’t write a hundred thousand words, that would take fucking years.”"}],[{"start":842.46,"text":"Would that even serve what he wants from writing now? Immediacy seems key."}],[{"start":852.28,"text":"He agrees. The quick response is “gratifying and interesting”. The pace seems to be part of the value — asserting the self, digesting minutiae, transporting that to readers while it’s fresh."}],[{"start":860.16,"text":"“We’re writing from the trenches,” he says. “It’s a direct record.” Carlo removes Kureishi’s sunglasses for a photograph. I belatedly observe his expressive, light-brown eyes. “Do you mind if we leave?” Of course not. “It was a good lunch,” he declares. And then, at speed, they’re gone, their departure like a misplaced full stop."}],[{"start":879.44,"text":"Hanif and Carlo Kureishi will be speaking at an event in association with Service95 Book Club at the Southbank Centre, London, on November 1 at 8pm"}],[{"start":889.16,"text":"Rebecca Watson is a commissioning editor and writer for FT Weekend and author of the novels ‘I Will Crash’ and ‘little scratch’"}],[{"start":896.6,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":911.08,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792769000_6656.mp3"}