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Hanif Kureishi

Perhaps more than any other British filmmaker, Hanif Kureishi startled the world with the grim but colorful realities of urban life for the youth culture in Thatcherite England. Born in Bromley, a London suburb, to a Pakistani father and a white English mother, he was the only Asian in his school. Called names by a teacher and spat upon and beaten by classmates he had known since childhood, Kureishi had firsthand experience of the rising tide of prejudice and racial animosity expressed by white working-class Britons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Much of his subsequent work as a playwright, screenwriter and novelist would ponder the complexities of being both Black and British.