The novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi is to publish a memoir about the accident that left him paralysed last year, expanding on the brutally honest material the author has been sharing on social media and online platform Substack, which he continues to dictate from an Italian hospital.
On Boxing Day 2022, the author of The Buddha of Suburbia was rushed to intensive care after a fall in Rome. He later tweeted, via dictation to family, that he may never be able to walk or use a pen again.
“I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself,” he wrote.
Since then his blogposts, The Kureishi Chronicles, and his tweets have shared insights on everything from his health to his recreational drug use. A recent post told of a visit from his schoolfriend David, whom Kureishi revealed he had fancied in his youth. David had pushed the writer around the hospital’s small garden and the pair had enjoyed talking.
“I need plenty of company at the present time. Being here has become more difficult as I feel more isolated from the general world, and more desperate to escape,” Kureishi said.
He also tweeted that he has had “many fruitful and fruitless discussions” with his wife, Isabella d’Amico, about whether they should stay put in Italy and “make use of the good physiotherapy” so that he can “get as strong and well” as he can, or whether they should start making their way back to London. “I miss my city and my friends,” he said, but added that if they travelled back, D’Amico would have to live alone in their house while he recovers in hospital.
All of the author’s previous full length works have been published in the UK by Faber. The memoir, titled Shattered, will however be published by Hamish Hamilton, the imprint of Penguin Random House that also publishes Bernardine Evaristo, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Ali Smith and Deborah Levy.
“Like everyone who knows Hanif, I was shocked by the news of his accident and the awful situation in which he suddenly found himself,” said Hamish Hamilton’s publishing director, Simon Prosser.
“And like thousands of others I was electrified by the words he began sending out into the world in January as Twitter threads, detailing his thoughts, feelings and memories, as they came to him, with extraordinary clarity, force and composure. In them, we hear Hanif’s instantly recognisable voice, reporting from a place which every one of us can imagine and fear.”
In his first tweet after going into intensive care, Kureishi wrote: “I had just seen Mo Salah score against Aston Villa, sipped half a beer, when I began to feel dizzy. I leant forward and put my head between my legs; I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, my wife on her knees beside me.”
In an early missive, published in the Guardian in January, he said that publishing dispatches online is “the one thing, apart from the love of the wife, that keeps me alive and gives me meaning, because so many people read these rather sad if not rambling pieces, and they respond to me.”
He said: “I wouldn’t advise having an accident like mine, but I would say that lying completely inert and silent in a drab room on the outskirts of Rome, without much distraction, is certainly good for creativity. Deprived of newspapers, music, and all the rest of it, you will find yourself becoming very imaginative.”
Kureishi has been very candid about his private life in his Twitter threads and blog posts, sharing that he has had some “great cocaine nights” with his children.
He also wrote he hopes he “might eventually be capable of a little light cunnilingus” when he recovers more, and detailed an orgy he had had in Amsterdam. The latter was typed out by his 24-year-old son, Kier. “He is a little freaked by the idea of writing this down but here goes anyway,” the tweet said.
Prosser explained that over the coming months he will be working with Kureishi to shape these hospital dispatches into a book. “I more than hope - I believe - that the ultimate arc of this book will be one of recuperation,” he said.
“Simon and I have known each other for many years, and it is a pleasure to be working together at last on a book,” the author said.
Earlier this month Kureishi also announced a non-fiction writing competition for his Substack subscribers. Entrants should submit up to 750 words on the subject of “Injury” for the chance to be published on The Kureishi Chronicles along with the author’s comments.
Kureishi made his name as a screenwriter and novelist in the 1980s, focusing on sexuality, race and class. In 1985 he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in London, and in 1987 the screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, both films directed by Stephen Frears.
