English novelist, screenwriter and teacher Hanif Kureishi was BOTD in 1954. Born in London to a Pakistani father and a white English mother, he studied philosophy at Kings College, and started his literary career writing pornography under male and female pseudonyms. He began writing plays in his late teens, produced at Hampstead Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre. He is best known for his screenplay for the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette, featuring a gay love story between a Pakistani man and a white skinhead. Originally screened on British television, it had a cinematic release in the United States, becoming an arthouse hit and earning Kureishi an Oscar nomination and launching the career of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Praised for his witty and open-minded presentations of family life, race relations, gender warfare and polymorphous sexuality, he continued similar themes in his screenplays Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and London Kills Me. His 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia won the Whitbread Award and was adapted successfully by Kureishi for television. Kureishi identifies as bisexual, though the majority of his relationships have been with women, including film producer Tracey Scoffield, with whom he has two children. His 1998 screenplay Intimacy was based on his separation from Scoffield and abandonment of the family home. Filmed by French director Patrice Chéreau, it caused controversy for its scenes of unstimulated fellatio between actors Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance. Kureishi had further hits with The Mother, exploring a clandestine inter-generational relationship between a 70 year-old widow and her daughter’s boyfriend, and Venus, a comedy about an elderly sex-obsessed actor. In 2013 he was appointed professor of creative writing at Kingston University in South-West London, causing a media storm after he declared writing classes were a waste of time and that 99.9% of his students were talentless. His memoir Shattered was published in 2024, recounting an accident in 2022 that left him a tetraplegic. He married his long-term partner Isabella d’Amico in 2025.