Hello, I'm Kesti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast

in 1996, and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My castaway this week is a novelist and playwright. He was born in Bromley in Kent, the son of an

Indian father and an English mother. School didn't interest him, but writing did, and at the age

of 19, he had his first play performed at the Royal Court. More plays followed, and by the age

of 26, he was a full-time professional writer. I haven't had a job since, he says.

Unless, of course, you can't writing my beautiful Laundret and the Buddha of Suburbia as doing a job.

He enjoys being iconoclastic, race, and sex-adominant themes, but as one critic has said of him,

there are a few people better place to write about contemporary Britain. He is Hanif Kureshi.

Your major successes, though, Hanif, have in the main been about your past, not so much your present

Laundret in the 80s, Buddha was set in the 70s. Do you think you're too much part of the

establishment these days to go on using your own life as material?

Well, if you're a writer, you don't really have anything else. You can only use what you have

around you. But you've enjoyed being a rebel, being iconoclastic, as I say, haven't you?

I remember Newsweek writing, Hanif Kureshi lives to offend. You know, you enjoyed it when

the BBC switchboard was jammed when you said on start the week that the poll tax riots were

terrific. I mean, that's your style, isn't it? That's been the way it's been.

When I started out, I was surprised by the fact that you could say things and people would write

them down, because it had never happened to me before. And after the Laundret, when people started

to listen to me, I was amazed that the people would take what you said seriously.

And I enjoyed playing with that. So, what are you going to write about now?

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