Rafiushan's brother (Hanif's uncle), Omar Kureishi, was a newspaper columnist and manager of the Pakistan cricket team.

[3] Rafiushan travelled to the UK in 1950[6] to study law, but he ran out of money and needed to take a desk job at the Pakistani high commission instead.

[3] He wrote My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980s London, for a film directed by Stephen Frears.

The screenplay, especially the racial discrimination experienced, contained elements from Kureishi's experiences as the only Pakistani student in his class at school.

[citation needed] His book The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel and was made into a BBC television series with a soundtrack by David Bowie.

This created some controversy as Kureishi recently had left his own partner (the editor and producer Tracey Scoffield) and two young sons; it was assumed to be at least semi-autobiographical.

It tells the story of a cross-generational relationship with a reversal of expected roles: a 70-year-old English grandmother seduces her daughter's boyfriend.

[3] In October 2013, Kureishi was appointed as a professor in the creative writing department at Kingston University in London, where he was a writer in residence.

[5] Kureishi's family have accused him of exploiting them with thinly disguised references in his work, with his sister Yasmin writing a letter to The Guardian about it.

Yasmin takes issue with her brother for his thinly-disguised autobiographical references in his first novel The Buddha of Suburbia, as well as for the image of his own past that he portrays in newspaper interviews.

[28] In September 2024, the BBC released a biographical documentary "In My Own Words" by his close friend Nigel Williams in which the writer revisits his life and career via the medium of old archive footage.

[29] Kureishi was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours for services to Literature and Drama.