SOURCE: “Hanif Kureishi on London,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3, Autumn, 1999, pp. 37-56.

In the following interview, Kureishi discusses racial and cultural issues in contemporary London, his background and experiences in London, and the creative processes behind his fiction and films.

[MacCabe:] Good evening, I’m Colin MacCabe, Chairman of the London Consortium, which, together with the Architectural Association, has organised this conference on London as a post-colonial city, to which Hanif Kureishi’s season of films and particularly tonight’s conversation are a curtain-raiser. Kureishi’s work has almost all been set in London and is, arguably, the most significant body of work which investigates, interrogates and celebrates the realities of post-colonial London.

Hanif, I’d like to start the evening by asking you very simply how, as a Londoner born and bred, you see the capital?

[Kureishi:] I was born, actually, in the suburbs, in a...