Hanif Kureishi (born 5 December 1954) is a British playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and novelist of South Asian and English descent. In 2008, The Times included Kureishi in its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Early life Kureishi was born in Bromley, South London to a Pakistani father, Rafiushan (Shanoo) Kureishi, and an English mother, Audrey Buss. His father was from a wealthy Madras family, whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of British India in 1947. Rafiushan came to the UK in 1950 to study law but once he ran out of money it was necessary to take a desk job at the Pakistani embassy instead. Here he met his wife-to-be, Buss, "a young lower-middle-class suburban woman". He wanted to be a writer but his ambitions were frustrated, "eking out a life of permanent disappointment, writing novels on the kitchen table, but getting turned down." The couple were married, the family settled in Bromley where Kureishi was born. In an interview, Kureishi notes:My [paternal] grandfather, an army doctor, was a colonel in the Indian army. Big family. Servants. Tennis court. Cricket. Everything. My father went to the Cathedral School that Salman Rushdie went to. Later, in Pakistan, my family were close to the Bhuttos. My uncle Omar was a newspaper columnist and the manager of the Pakistan cricket team...My grandfather, the colonel, was terrifying. A hard-living, hard-drinking gambler. Womanising. Around him it was like The Godfather. They drank and they gossiped. The women would come and go. Hanif Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School and studied for A-levels at Bromley College of Technology. While at this college, he was elected as student union president (1972) and some of the characters from his semi-autobiographical work The Buddha of Suburbia are from this period. He went on to spend a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University, then withdrew. Later he attended King's College London and earned a degree in philosophy. Career Kureishi started his career in the 1970s as a pornography writer, under the pseudonyms Antonia French and Karim. He went on to write plays for the Hampstead Theatre, Soho Poly, and by the age of 18, was with the Royal Court. He wrote My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980s London for a film directed by Stephen Frears. The screenplay, especially the racial discrimination experienced, contained elements from