Hanif Kureishi said that “the world seems much darker” after the fall last year that left him unable to move his arms and legs.
The author, known for his screenplays for My Beautiful Laundrette and My Son the Fanatic, and his novels The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, appeared on the BBC Radio 4 show Today to discuss how the accident has affected his life.
Kureishi fell at his Rome apartment last December and was paralyzed as a result. He has chronicled his life since the accident on social media and in his Substack newsletter. Next year he is scheduled to publish a memoir, Shattered, about his fall and its aftermath.
On BBC’s Today program, Kureishi discussed talking with his fellow hospital patients about their injuries.
“There's a guy I was talking to the other day, he was in his garden, he tripped over a rake and broke his neck,” Kureishi said. “He was absolutely outraged by the injustice of what had happened to him. It’s very common, with these kinds of circumstances, [to feel] that you’ve been plucked out of the world at random and punished in some kind of Kafkaesque way. But then you get a much broader sense that this happens all the time to people."
He said that before the accident, he was “quite a jaunty fellow,” but that his outlook has changed for the worse.
“But to be struck with an illness like mine, you suddenly see what other people are made of, and who they are, and how generous and kind they can be, or how indifferent they can also be,” he said.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
