- Home
- Non-fiction
- Essays & Collections
- Essays
- Collected Essays: 1986–2011
Collected Essays: 1986–2011
A new paperback edition of Hanif Kureishi’s wide-ranging and thought-provoking essays.
3 in stock
Join Faber Members for 10% off your first order.
This collection begins in the early 1980s with The Rainbow Sign, which was written as the Introduction to the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette. It allowed Kureishi to expand upon the issues raised by the film: race, class, sexuality – issues that were provoked by his childhood and family situation. In the ensuing decades, he has developed these initial ideas, especially as the issue of Islam’s relation to the West has become one of the burning issues of the time.
Kureishi shows how flexible a form the essay can be – as intellectual as Sontag or Adam Phillips, as informal and casual as Max Beerbohm, as cool and minimalist as Joan Didion, or as provocative as Norman Mailer. As with his fictional work, these essays display Kureishi’s ability to capture the temper of the times.
Tremendously likeable . . . and so compellingly written . . . Displays the same crisp intelligence, balmy humour and consistently lucid prose that characterise the best of his fiction.
Vibrant . . . Portrays Kureishi’s journey from aspiring writer in Bromley in the ’60s to all-round man of letters.
These essays tackle politics, cultural changes and the role of the writer and reveal Kureishi’s knack for argument . . . Both provocative and convincing.
Hanif Kureishi was born and brought up in Kent. He read philosophy at King’s College, London. In 1981 he won the George Devine Award for his plays Outskirts and Borderline, and in 1982 he was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the Royal Court Theatre. In 1984 he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette, which received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. His second screenplay Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) was…
Read MoreBrowse a selection of books we think you might also like, with genre matches and a few wildcards thrown in.
After a fall which has immobilised him, writer Hanif Kureishi created a remarkable Substack newsletter, The Kureishi Chronicles. Dictated from …
The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi’s debut novel won the Whitbread Award for first novel and inspired a groundbreaking BBC …
Watch the live stream of the our Faber Members event with Hanif Kureishi at the Bindery in London.
Celebrating our 90th anniversary, Faber staff take on the tricky task of selecting their three favourite Faber books.