Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi is the author of novels (including The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album and Intimacy), story collections (Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day, The Body), plays (including Outskirts, Borderline and Sleep With Me), and screenplays (including My Beautiful Laundrette, My Son the Fanatic and Venus). Among his other publications are the collection of essays Dreaming and Scheming, The Word and the Bomb and the memoir My Ear at his Heart.

From his Q & A with Anna Metcalfe for the Financial Times:

Who are your literary influences?

PG Wodehouse, Proust, Freud. When I was a kid it was Kerouac, Roth, Mailer and Henry Miller. But in the end you find your own voice.

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Who would you choose to play you in a film about your life?

Naveen Andrews has already played me in The Buddha of Suburbia but now I’d choose George Clooney.

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What book do you wish you’d written?

Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. But I wouldn’t have liked to have spent all that time in bed.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue