Kureishi moves to Hamish Hamilton from Faber with Shattered memoir

Hamish Hamilton has bought Hanif Kureishi’s memoir, Shattered, a chronicle of the author’s accident last year that left him paralysed. The book will mark the multiple award-winner’s first full-length release in the UK that has not been published by Faber, a relationship that has included over 30 books, stretching back four decades.   

Simon Prosser, publishing director at Hamish Hamilton, bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Sarah Chalfant at The Wylie Agency, for publication in 2024.

On Boxing Day 2022, Kureishi⁠ fell while on a walk near his apartment in Rome, after which he lost the use of his limbs. The author of numerous plays, novels and screenplay⁠s— including the 1990 Whitbread First Novel winnerThe Buddha of Suburbia and Stephen Frears’ 1985 film "My Beautiful Laundrette"⁠—⁠revealed his condition a couple weeks later via social media.   

The publisher said Shattered will build on the series of dispatches Kureishi continues to dictate from an Italian hospital: “Posted to social media by his family, these compelling reflections on his situation, on writing and on life, composed with fearless honesty, insight and humour, have moved and fascinated readers around the world."

In one missive the author wrote: “I wouldn’t advise having an accident like mine, but I would say that lying completely inert and silent in a drab room on the outskirts of Rome, without much distraction, is certainly good for creativity. Deprived of newspapers, music, and all the rest of it, you will find yourself becoming very imaginative.”

Prosser said: ‘Like everyone who knows Hanif, I was shocked by the news of his accident and the awful situation in which he suddenly found himself: confined to a hospital bed, with no movement or sensation from the neck down; a uniquely free spirit now reliant entirely on the care and help of others.

“And like thousands of others I was electrified by the words he began sending out into the world in January as Twitter threads, detailing his thoughts, feelings and memories, as they came to him, with extraordinary clarity, force and composure. In them, we hear Hanif’s instantly recognisable voice, reporting from a place which everyone of us can imagine and fear...over the coming months I will be working with Hanif as he shapes these hospital dispatches into a book, and I more than hope⁠—I believe—that the ultimate arc of this book will be one of recuperation."

Kureishi said: ”Simon and I have known each other for many years, and it is a pleasure to be working together at last on a book.”