UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · FICTION · DRAMA
Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi (born 5 December 1954) is a British playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He wrote the screenplay for Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), earning Academy Award and BAFTA Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. He is also known for his novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) which was adapted into a four-part BBC drama series. Following a spinal injury in 2022, he wrote Shattered (2024) to wide acclaim. The book was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
When the phone rings, who would you most like it to be?
— from Love in a blue time
Most acclaimed
The Buddha of Suburbia
Karim lives with his Mum and Dad in a suburb of south London and dreams of making his escape to the bright lights of the big city. But his father is no ordinary Dad, he is 'the buddha of suburbia', a strange and compelling figure whose powers of meditation hold a circle of would-be mystics spellbound with the fascinations of the East. Among his disciples is the glamorous and ambitious Eva, and when 'the buddha of suburbia' runs off with her to a crumbling flat in Barons Court, Karim's life becomes changed in ways that even he had never dreamed of . . .
Love in a blue time
Written over the span of a decade, Love in a Blue Time reveals the essence of a generation - from the liberating irreverence of the seventies to the dilemmas and disillusionments of the nineties. In "With Your Tongue Down My Throat," a Pakistani girl's visit to London foments a revolution in her conservative home. In "My Son the Fanatic," a father, suspicious of his son's rejection of his once-sacred adolescent possessions, makes an unsettling discovery about the new values of the younger generation. And throughout, men and women, once carefree, careless, and usually stoned, grapple with responsibility, fidelity, and other complications of adult life in the middle-class nineties. Driven by love, but distracted by sex, drugs, and the sheer compulsion of argument, these characters are consummate voices of their time. And Kureishi, naughty, provocative, yet intensely sympathetic, finds the heart of their struggle.
The last word
2007
If there is such a thing as reason, it has to be universal. Reason must reflect objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view - principles that anyone with enough intelligence ought to be able to recognize as correct. But this universality of reason is what relativists and subjectivists deny in ever-increasing numbers. And such subjectivism is not just an inconsequential intellectual flourish or badge of theoretical chic. It is exploited to deflect argument and to belittle the pretensions of the arguments of others. The continuing spread of this relativistic way of thinking threatens to make public discourse increasingly difficult and unproductive. . In The Last Word, Thomas Nagel, one of the most influential philosophers writing in English, presents a sustained defense of reason against the attacks of subjectivism, delivering systematic rebuttals of relativistic claims with respect to language, logic, science, and ethics. He shows that the last word in disputes about the objective validity of any form of thought must lie in some unqualified thoughts about how things are - thoughts that we cannot regard from outside as mere psychological dispositions. His work sets a new standard in the debate on this crucially important question and should generate intense interest both within and outside the philosophical community.