Kureishi was born on 5 December 1954[1] in Bromley, South London to a Pakistani father, Rafiushan (Shanoo) Kureishi, and an English mother, Audrey Buss.[2][3][4] His father was from a wealthy family based in Madras (now Chennai), whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947.
Rafiushan traveled to the UK in 1950[5] to study law, but he ran out of money and needed to take a desk job at the Pakistani embassy instead.[3][4] There he met his wife-to-be, Audrey Buss, "a young lower-middle-class suburban woman".[6] He wanted to be a writer but his ambitions were frustrated, "eking out a life of permanent disappointment, writing novels on the kitchen table, but getting turned down."[3][3] After the couple married, they settled in Bromley, where their son Hanif Kureishi was born.
In an interview, Kureishi notes:
My [paternal] grandfather, an army doctor, was a colonel in the British Indian Army. Big family. Servants. Tennis court. Cricket. Everything. My father went to the Cathedral School that Salman Rushdie went to. Later, in Pakistan, my family were close to the Bhuttos. My uncle Omar was a newspaper columnist and the manager of the Pakistan cricket team...My grandfather, the colonel, was terrifying. A hard-living, hard-drinking gambler. Womanising. Around him it was like The Godfather. They drank and they gossiped. The women would come and go.[3]
Hanif Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School and studied for A-levels at Bromley College of Technology.[7] While at this college, he was elected as student union president (1972). Some of the characters from his semi-autobiographical novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, are drawn from this period.[8] He spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University, then withdrew.[7] Later he attended King's College London[1] and earned a degree in philosophy.[7]
