“I feel like I could die at any moment”

IIt was the day after Christmas 2022 and Hanif Kureishi was in Rome, at the apartment of his Italian girlfriend Isabella D’Amico. “I was drinking a beer, smoking a joint, watching football,” the author of The Buddha of the Suburbs And My Beautiful Laundromat said in a documentary for the BBC In my own words Seconds later, “everything went blurry and I fell on my head.” The impact of the fall severed the nerves in his spinal cord and he woke up on the ground in a pool of blood. “I couldn’t feel my body. I could see my arms moving but I didn’t know what they were, I thought they were sea creatures.”

“I was finished, my life was ruined. It was kind of over.