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The Buddha of Suburbia
Kureishi is one of the most important and popular writers born in Britain of “New Commonwealth” origins. His father Rafiushan was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947 and where several of them occupy a prominent place in the cultural life of the country. Rafiushan came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies. After meeting and marrying Kureishi's mother Audrey, he settled in Bromley, where Kureishi was born on Dec. 5, 1954.
Kureishi's early life was in many ways archetypally suburban. His father commuted every day to his job at the Pakistan embassy , which provided his family with a comfortable life. Kureishi was educated at local schools, including Bromley Technical High School (later Ravenswood Comprehensive), the alma mater of pop icons such as David Bowie (whose music provided the sound-track for the BBC adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia in 1993) and Billy Idol. According to interviews given by Kureishi, however, he experienced considerable racism at school on account of his mixed-race origins. At the age of fourteen, Kureishi made the decision to become a writer and during his teens wrote several preliminary versions of what was to become his best-known novel, The Buddha (1990).
After completing his A-Levels at a sixth-form college, Kureishi spent an unhappy year at Lancaster University studying philosophy. In 1973, he recommenced university at Kings College, London University, where he began to frequent the capital's fringe theatres, eventually finding part-time work at the Royal Court theatre. In 1976, a short play, Soaking the Heat, was given a Sunday night reading. Between then and 1983, Kureishi focused on drama, producing a number of plays, including The Mother Country (Riverside Studios, 1980), The King and Me (Soho Poly, 1980), Outskirts (R.S.C. Warehouse, 1981) and, under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark, Borderline (Royal Court, 1981) - the latter being Kureishi's first major critical success. The last of his early plays, Birds of Passage, was performed at the Hampstead Theatre in 1983.
Increasingly disaffected with the pretensions and political correctness of “fringe”, Kureishi concentrated in the 1980s on film. 1985 saw the release of My Beautiful Laundrette, which brought Kureishi to popular attention and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. This was followed in 1988 by Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, which received much more mixed reviews, although it is in many ways a more interesting film than Laundrette. In 1991, Kureishi directed as well as wrote London Kills Me, which was very poorly reviewed.
Given a two-year window of opportunity by his fees from Laundrette, Kureishi embarked on what was to become his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, published to acclaim in 1990 and winner of the Whibread Award for best first novel of the year. This was followed by The Black Album (1995), a less successful novel about contemporary London life which also engages with the issues raised by the fatwa pronounced on Kureishi's friend Salman Rushdie.
In 1993, twins were born to Kureishi [next page]