Hanif Kureishi is one of the best-known British-Asian writers working for the stage and, more recently, for the screen. He has also acquired a reputation for his fiction. As his career has progressed, he has placed an increasing emphasis on his own ethnic background and on the difficulties and the possibilities created by the clash and fusion of cultural and religious traditions.

Kureishi's background has been the subject of controversy, with his mother and sister disputing his versions of it. He was born in London on 5 December 1954 and raised in Bromley, Kent. His mother was English; his father, the son of a doctor, was a lieutenant colonel in the Indian army who immigrated to England after the partition of the Subcontinent in 1947. The father had ambitions as a novelist but failed to obtain a publisher for any of his works.

Kureishi's introduction to the theater came when he...