Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

Bart Moore-Gilbert (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 10.3.5: South Asian Diasporic Literature and Culture, 1800-present.
Vol. editors: Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Pavan Kumar Malreddy (J W Goethe University of Frankfurt), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège), Muneeza Shamsie (Independent Scholar - Asia), Niaz Zaman (Independent University Bangladesh)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1990

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Kureishi's first novel, is generally considered to be the most successful of his prose fictions. The winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, it has been translated into more than twenty languages and was adapted into an acclaimed four-part BBC television series in 1993. Like My Beautiful Laundrette, it is centred on a mixed-race British-Asian protagonist, Karim Amir, though its historical focus is the 1970s rather than the 1980s. Like this film, The Buddha is also at once a “condition of England” piece, an exploration of the changing meanings of “Englishness” and an analysis of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

At the outset of the novel, …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1011 words

Citation: Moore-Gilbert, Bart. "The Buddha of Suburbia". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 January 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1371, accessed 25 November 2024.]

Save this article