Small Talk’: A Workshop on Hanif Kureishi with Sita Balani & Ashwani Sharma

For the third workshop in the ‘Small Talk: On the Corners of London & Paris’ event series, part of the 2026 Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship, we will discuss the work of Hanif Kureishi.

Born in the London suburbs to a Pakistani father and English mother, throughout his career as a novelist, essayist, playwright and screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi has sought to use to the language and chatter of migrant populations to capture the way London ‘became a kind of inferno of pleasure and madness’ for them.

It is these qualities that define his novels such as The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995); his films My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and London Kills Me (1991); his essays Dreaming and Scheming (2002); and his recent memoir Shattered (2024).

Two guests will us help to illuminate the aesthetics and politics of the diasporic city in Kureishi’s vast body of work:

• Sita Balani is an academic, writer and activist whose work explores anti-racism, sexuality, feminism, education and colonial history.

• Ashwani Sharma is a writer and intellectual concerned with postcolonial cinema, art and music.

The workshop will be held at Round Table Books in Brixton.

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Host or Publisher University of London Institute in Paris