Creative writing can't be taught, claims author Hanif Kureishi

At the height of his success in the 1980s and 1990s, Hanif Kureishi had the reputation of being something of the enfant terrible on the British literary scene. His brilliance was undoubted – the awards and success of My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Buddha of Suburbia had underlined his acclaim as one of the brightest young writers on the horizon. But so was the frequency with which he rubbed everyone the wrong way – whether it was the Muslim clergy with his depiction of an affair between two boys – one a Pakistani and the other a white Christian; the Margaret Thatcher establishment whom he described as an "authoritarian rat-hole", or his family, who accused him of feeding off their lives. No one can accuse

At Jaipur for the ZeeJLF, Kureishi was part of several discussions – the first on VS Naipaul and his book, A House for Mr Biswas; a second on film adaptations of novels; and a third on his last novel, The Last Word, about two writers, one old and the other young who is writing a biography of the former, which is based, so it is said, on Naipaul and Patrick French.

Asked whether there was some truth in that rumour, Kureishi is dismissive —"I'm so bored with that question. Everybody asks me that," he complains. Grey and 60, Kureishi has evidently lost much of his sass, though he retains some of the earlier sting. "I am very mellow now, baby, I'm very mellow," he says. "The fire's going. My work has an energy though. It's funny and alive. You can be mellow without being dead."

Kureishi's bluntness is also a sign of searing honesty, a quality that's been so great a part of his novels' appeal too. Every novel, he says, "is always based on something real. The last word is a book about writers and that's all there is to it. All the characters are me, the older men is like me, the younger man is like me, the women are like me – some feminine side of me," the laconic reply mocking journalists who compel an artist to pin down his muse to a place and a time.

Of course, Kureishi claims he has no quarrel chatting with journalists. "I'm used to it. I have spent all my life talking to journalists. There are very few writers who don't give interviews; there are some very wise ones who don't."

Naipaul, though, has been a real inspiration. "I was brown boy in England in the 1960s thinking I want to be a writer. But most of the writers I had heard of were English upper class men - Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Forster and so on. What do I do? Is it possible. And here was a brown man from a tiny island who wrote wonderfully. That was a new thing in the world. It was a great example to somebody like me."

Ironically, Kureishi now teaches a course in creative writing to wannabe authors. With characteristic honesty, however, he confesses it isn't something that can be taught. "Nobody I know, none of my generation Martin Amis, [Kazuo] Ishiguro, Salman [Rushdie] went to writing school. But we all teach writing school - we have to, to make a living to teach something that cannot be taught." He's not too enamoured, too, of the kind of writing that emerges from such courses. "You can always tell a creative writing writer. They are always over-f**- written; it's really well done and really f** dull. It's not crude enough, not raw enough. All these young people want to be writers. They all think they are going to writer bestsellers, I have written bestsellers and I am still f** poor."

The unblinking honesty is turned on himself as well. "I only go to festivals if I want to go to the country," he says. "It's nice to be India because it's cold in England— it's nice to hang out, the good food, what's not to like?"