Hanif Kureishi says ‘world seems much darker’ on anniversary of Boxing Day accident

The British author Hanif Kureishi has said the “world seems much darker” since suffering the “Kafkaesque” Boxing Day accident in Italy last year.

Exactly one year since the terrible fall in Rome left Kureishi without the use of his hands and legs, the award-winning novelist and playwright reflected on his fate – and reconnecting with his readers – in a new interview.

During an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 26 December, he recalled the thoughts that filled his head while waiting for an ambulance on that fateful day.

“I thought, as I guess many people do when they die, that ‘this is ridiculous to die in such a stupid way’,” the 69-year-old author told interviewer Mishal Husain. “Surely I could do something a bit more dramatic, a bit more interesting to tell people”.

Kureishi, one of Today’s Christmas guest editors, spent the last year in five different hospitals across Italy before returning home to the UK. Over that time, he added, Kureishi met others whose lives had, similarly, been upended by freak accidents that seemed unfair and unjust.

“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.

Kureishi is the author of the cult classic ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ (Getty Images for AFI)

“But then you get a much broader sense that this happens all the time to people,” the author of cult classic The Buddha of Suburbia added.

Asked how the ordeal changed him, Kureishi replied it had stripped him of his sense of humour and tinged his perspective on life with cynicism.

“The world seems much darker,” the Oscar-nominated screenwriter admitted. “And you look at all those innocent people strolling around the world looking so healthy and fit and happy and you think: ‘You don’t know guv, what’s coming down the road.’

“And that’s a very cruel and cynical way of seeing things, but you’ve gone through a door when you have an accident in the way that I had an accident.”

Kureishi was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film adaptation of his book My Beautiful Laundrette, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke.

The movie’s director Stephen Frears was among the many talents who rallied around Kureishi in the aftermath of the accident, adding that “everyone is hoping a full recovery is possible”.

He told The Independent: “It’s devastating what’s happened. He’s being so brave and courageous. Everyone is hoping that a full recovery is possible. It’s extraordinary that the two best Asian writers are incapacitated – him and Salman Rushdie.”

Rushdie, who lost vision in one eye after an on-stage stabbing attack last year, also shared his wishes for Kureishi, describing him as “the younger brother I never had”.

“I’m here for him always, as he always has been there for me. Hopefully, he will be his outrageous, mischievous self again soon,” the author of Midnight’s Children said.

‘The world seems much darker,’ the Oscar-nominated screenwriter admitted (Getty Images)

“I’m here for him always, as he always has been there for me. Hopefully, he will be his outrageous, mischievous self again soon,” the 76-year-old added.

The accident last year changed many things about Kureishi’s life, including transforming his interpersonal relationships, with the Bromley-born writer describing himself as a “reluctant dictator” in the aftermath of the fall.

“I can’t even make a cup of tea. I can’t scratch my nose. So I’ve had to learn to make demands. I’m a reluctant dictator,” he said. “There are friends and acquaintances who have been absolutely devoted – people you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of as being particularly like that.”

One week after the accident, Kureishi began documenting his recovery journey via dispatches from his hospital bed in Italy. Since then, nearly 18,000 readers have subscribed to Kureishi’s Substack channel for his writings on “my new immobilised predicament” as well as “sex and drugs and music, TV shows and writers I admire, and my memories”.

However, the accident altered his writing process as dramatically as the rest of his life, leaving Kureishi to “find a completely new way to write”. He said he has learned to visualise what he’s going to write in his head before repeating it “as legibly and coherently” to his son Carlo, who transcribes each blog post.

These weekly posts – touching everything from his recreational drug use and creative writing, to updates from the hospital – have helped reinvigorate Kureishi’s relationship with his readers, who give him the strength to continue, he said.

“I communicate with other people, and I try and remember that what’s happened to me is not so uncommon,” Kureishi told Husain. “You realise that every family in the world has experienced death or illness or disability in some form or another, and that they will.

“And so they tell their stories and they’re about brain injuries, physical injuries, which are very moving and upsetting and interesting, and many of them are much worse than mine.”

The author, who was made CBE in 2008, returned home before Christmas Day, according to the pre-recorded show.

His blog “The Kureishi Chronicles” is set to be turned into a memoir called Shattered. The book will be published by Hamish Hamilton, the imprint of Penguin Random House, and released in 2024.