Hanif Kureishi

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Hanif Kureishi, 2008

Hanif Kureishi CBE (born December 5, 1954 in Bromley , London ) is a British writer. He is the author of novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and essays. He also worked as a director.

Life

Hanif Kureishi was born in the London suburb of Bromley in 1954 to a Pakistani and an Englishwoman. This is where he grew up, and in 1965 his place of birth was incorporated into Greater London . In 1981 he won the George Devine Award for his play Outskirts , and a year later he was appointed town clerk at London's Royal Court Theater . In 1990, Kureishi published his first novel The Buddha of Suburbia , which was awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel and received extremely positive reviews (including by Salman Rushdie ), and was also broadcast by the BBC in 1993 as a four-part series. This was followed by the three films My Beautiful Laundrette ("My wonderful laundrette", 1984) with Daniel Day-Lewis , Sammy and Rosie Get Laid ("Sammy and Rosie do it", 1987) and London Kills Me ("London creates everyone", 1991) with Fiona Shaw . My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar .

His works have been translated into 36 languages. For his literary and artistic performance Kureishi was in the UK, the CBE - Order of Merit of the Order of the British Empire and the award of France de Chevalier Order of Arts and Letters awarded.

Kureishi has three children and is married. In 2009 he was appointed to the competition jury of the 62nd Cannes International Film Festival .

Work and meaning

Kureishi is now one of the most important Anglo-Asian authors of contemporary British literature, alongside Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith , who has also made a name for himself internationally. At the center of his cinematic, narrative and dramatic fictions are mostly the complex processes of individual processing of experiences of cultural hybridity in the post-colonial realities of multicultural London life.

In his literary work, Kureishi processes his own experiences as the son of an Indian immigrant of Muslim faith and an English mother who grew up in the socially disadvantaged areas of the southern suburbs of London. Because of his skin color as in-between , he got to know everyday racism and ethnic discrimination very early on , as well as the typical differences in the life patterns and dreams of self-realization of the first and second generation of Indian-Pakistani immigrants who, on the one hand , were in the field of tension between revisionist fundamentalization and upwardly mobile socio-cultural assimilation .

Regardless of this multicultural background of his own origins, Kureishi has always fully understood himself as a British citizen and writer. He expresses this, for example, with the words of the narrator and protagonist Karim Amir in the opening section of his strongly autobiographical and still most weighty successful novel The Buddha of Suburbia 1991: “ I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. ” (German:“ I'm a true Englishman - at least almost. People often think of me as a strange sort of Englishman as if I belonged to a new breed of English that emerged from two cultures. ")

After studying philosophy at King's College London , Kureishi began his writing career as a playwright in the funding environment of the Royal Court Theater and made his breakthrough with the two scripts for the internationally successful feature film productions My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid , directed by Stephen Frears . Both films are set in London in the 1980s, which was marked by Thatcherism and social tensions and racial unrest. As in Kureishi's later stories, which testify to political awareness but not necessarily to political and moral correctness, the focus of both films is on the surprising development stories of representative characters, their actions both through the play of erotic desire and through the crossing of cultural borders is determined. The cinematic staging initially defines the characters as the products of intersecting discourses of race, social class and gender by assigning a large number of stereotypical characteristics on the background of coded behavioral expectations , in order to then undermine and subvert the expectation clichés through individually deviating, cross-border behavior and interculturally negotiated multi-layered identity constructs in this way to explore or demonstrate novel, plausibly developed design options.

Not only because of the very successful cinematic collaboration with Frears, but not least because of the affinity of his storytelling to the cinematic representation medium, Kureishi continued to create his fictions in the 1990s primarily in the medium of film. He wrote the scripts for film adaptations of his short stories and was responsible as screenwriter and director for the film London Kills Me (1991), which remained controversial in the criticism.

In addition, from the beginning of the 1990s, Kureishi concentrated increasingly on the possibilities of presenting prose telling in various large and small forms. This is reflected in his widely acclaimed narrative work, which now includes four novels in addition to the short story collection Love in a Blue Time (1997). His debut novel The Budda of Suburbia was followed by The Black Album (1995), Intimacy (1998) and Gabriel's Gift (2001). If in The Budda Kureishi tries to capture the attitude towards life and the color of the times in London in the 1970s through the individualized perspective of his first-person narrator Karim Amir in the form of a fictional autobiography, in The Black Album he endeavors to trace the turbulent career of the young protagonist Shahid in London in the 1980s by choosing an authoritative narrator . Both novels, however, are always dominated by the affirmation of the efforts to create individual scope for creativity and the joyful search for and sounding out role-like self-presentations, which result in creative new combinations of different discursive preformations and stereotypes. These are confirmed interactively in hybrid identity drafts and exceed the moralizing warnings about the dangers of subjective excessive demands or diverging, diffusing identities. In addition, with all the affirmation of the liberating dynamic of erotic desire, Kureishi's novels also ensure that it does not get stuck in blind consumerism or pure intellectual hedonism . Neither does the tension between the erotic in Kureishi's novels go hand in hand with the loss of political awareness of the persistence of power asymmetries or of ethnic stereotyping and racial discrimination.

In his literary works, Kureishi shows a preference for a complex intertextual localization of his characters and narratives and at the same time creates a textual universe with an abundance of allusions that can be interpreted as a correlate of his plural constructions of identity. Above all, his explorations of the possibilities, but also the risks of individual identity designs in the lived hybridity of a life-world concretized multicultural metropolis, have made his fictions a preferred field of research for critics from the environment of postcolonial and postmodern theoretical approaches, especially in recent times .

Works

  • 1980 The Mother Country . Play.
  • 1981 Outskirts . Play
  • 1990 The Buddha of Suburbia . Novel. English: The Buddha from the suburbs - the fate of immigrant families in London described using a young daring protagonist and his often funny adventures
  • 1991 London Kills Me . A film about young drug addicts outsiders and their struggle for survival in the London urban jungle
  • 1994 My Son the Fanatic . Short story (first published in The New Yorker )
  • 1995 The Black Album . Novel. German: The black album . Translated by Bernhard Robben . The student life of a colored person in the midst of fanatical Muslim student groups is discussed
  • 1997 Love in a Blue Time . Collection of short stories. German by Bernhard Robben: Love in a blue time
  • 1998 Intimacy . Novel. German: Restless closeness
  • 1999 Sleep With Me . Play
  • 2000 Midnight All Day . Short stories, German: Dark as the day
  • 2001 Gabriel's Gift . Roman Deutsch Gabriels Gabe , deals with a fictional father-son conflict
  • 2001 Hanif Kureishi in the series Contemporary World Writers , ed. BJ Moore, Manchester Univ. Press: Biographical and work analysis
  • 2003 The Body . Novel. German: In strange skin . The book is about a brain transplant into a young body and the problems that result from it
  • 2004 My Ear at His Heart . Autobiography. German by Henning Ahrens : My ear to your heart. Memories of my father , S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011 ISBN 978-3-10-041214-0
The book describes Kureishi's youth in London and his first attempts to become an artist, writer and philosopher, and the life story of his father and his family, some of whom live in Pakistan, is rolled out.
  • 2005 The Word and the Bomb . Collection of essays and excerpts from earlier works, written or compiled on the occasion of the terrorist attacks on July 7, 2005 in London
  • 2008 Something to tell you . Novel. German: I'll tell you
  • 2014 The last word. Novel. (German: The last word. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-10-002240-0 .)

Filmography (selection)

script

  • 1985: My beautiful laundrette “ My wonderful laundrette ” - Director: Stephen Frears
  • 1987: Sammy and Rosie get laid "Sammy and Rosie do it" - Director: Stephen Frears
  • 1991: London kills me "London creates them all" - template: his novel of the same name; Self-directed
  • 1997: My son the Fanatic - template: his short story of the same name; Director: Chris Curling
  • 1999: Mauvaise passe
  • 2003: The mother "Die Mutter - The Mother" - Director: Roger Michell; first prize in the Director's Fortnight section in Cannes
  • 2006: Venus

Literary template

Web links

Commons : Hanif Kureishi  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the information on The British Council - Literature : Hanif Kureishi . Retrieved September 27, 2017.
  2. ↑ See. See Hannif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia. Faber and Faber Ltd., London 2009 (1990), p. 3. The German translation of the quotation follows the translation of the novel by Bernhard Robben ; see The Buddha from the suburbs. Fischer Taschenbuch , Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3596030941 . For the background and overall context presented, see Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 328. See also Eberhard Kreutzer: Die ethnic minority literature of England. In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 489-495, here especially p. 493.
  3. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 328 f. See also Eberhard Kreutzer: The ethnic minority literature of England. In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 489-495, here especially p. 493.
  4. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 329; see also Eberhard Kreutzer: Die Ethnische Minoritätenliteratur Englands. In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 489-495, here especially p. 493.
  5. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 329.
personal data
SURNAME Kureishi, Hanif
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH 5th December 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Bromley , Kent