Up-front and personal: Hanif Kureishi visits the Centre for New Writing
The Centre for New Writing welcomed leading novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi to one of its Literature Live events in early March, where he gave the very first reading from his newly published novel Something to Tell You.
Kureishi, who was recently awarded a CBE for his services to literature and drama, has written novels including The Black Album and The Buddha of Suburbia, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was televised by the BBC. He is also well-known for his highly successful screenplays, which include My Beautiful Laundrette, The Mother and Venus.
He began the evening by reading from the opening of Something to Tell You, a freewheeling, often comic account of narrator Jamal's social interactions and pursuit of pleasure. Descriptions of his work as a successful psychoanalyst and relationships with 'significant others' are interspersed with memories of his coming of age in the 1970s, including his haunting experience of first love and furtive involvement in a murder.
After the reading the author participated in a discussion of his work with Centre co-director Ian McGuire, when he discussed his interest in psychology and its parallels with writing, his motivation in deciding whether to develop a story into a novel or a film (often financial!) and how all fictional writing is essentially the same: "... you invent characters, then you torture them!"
He also confirmed that he continues to be as interested in popular culture as high, stressing the importance of writing something a reader will relate to and want to read.
The evening concluded with a lively Q & A session with the audience, when Kureishi outlined his view that a society's culture is itself a form of therapy. In his view, "It's where we all go to think about ourselves - every teenager reads The Catcher in the Rye to find out why they're going mad."
Asked whether advancing years were making him any more careful about what he writes, he concluded, "Just existing upsets people; you have to write what's in you and other people have to deal with it."