"I Am Still Mad to Write"

How a tragic accident helped Hanif Kureishi find his rebellious voice again

- By Hillary Kelly

"That's what's great about being a writer," Hanif Kureishi told an interviewer a decade ago. "Every 10 years you become somebody else." He was 59 then, looking back on his younger days; in his 30s, he'd made his mark on a newly multicultural literary scene in London with the Oscar-nominated screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, followed by the prizewinning debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The son of an English mother and a Pakistani father, he was a bad boy in the spotlight, intimate with working-class locals and worldly elites, unabashed about smoking weed and sleeping around, and funny. He invoked P. G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth, and struck a chord with upstart young readers and writers (among them Zadie Smith). His boldly nonconformist voice was his own.

Then, at the age of 68, in December 2022, he became somebody unimaginably different after he keeled over onto a hard floor in Rome and came to consciousness a paraplegic. Trapped in a paralyzed body in a hospital bed, he tweeted two weeks later, via his son: "An insect, a hero, a ghost or Frankenstein's monster. Out of these mixings will come magnificent horrors and amazements. Every day when I dictate these thoughts, I open what is left of my broken body in order to try and reach you, to stop myself from dying inside." And suddenly, Kureishi was back in the spotlight. People around the world were listening. He kept dictating.