Hanif Kureishi: ‘The NHS only functions on immigration’

Author praised NHS staff as he looked back on his time in hospital after a traumatic neck injury

Author Hanif Kureishi has praised the work of immigrant NHS staff as he reflected on the traumatic injury that left him paralysed.

The 70-year-old author of The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album fainted and fell on his head after suffering a dizzy spell on Boxing Day 2022 while staying in Rome, Italy.

Kureishi, the screenwriter behind the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette, broke his neck and was left unable to move his limbs.

He documented his experiences in hospital in Italy and later in London by dictating his thoughts to family members, who published them as blogs on the newsletter platform Substack.

Kureishi’s dispatches from his hospital bed were eventually expanded and published as a memoir in 2024 titled Shattered.

Speaking at the 2025 Hay Festival of Literature and Arts on Tuesday evening (27 May), Kureishi said that “the NHS only functions on immigration” and that the “whole system would have broken down” without foreign workers.

Kureishi dictated his recent memoir after becoming paralysed (Getty)

“I met nurses every single day, all day, every day, from the Philippines, from South Africa, from India, from all over the world,” he told journalist Rosie Boycott.

“The NHS only functions on immigration,” he added. “Everybody that I worked with in the hospital was a recently, or more or less recently arrived immigrant. The whole system would have broken down [otherwise].”

Rosie Boycott speaks with the author at the Hay Festival (Sam Hardwick and Hay Festival)

Kureishi – who was speaking to the festival over video link from his home in London – had suffered a partial neck break. He still has feeling and movement in his limbs, though he cannot walk or grip with his hands

He told the audience that the evenings remain a “really frightening” time for him as he wakes up “terrified” that his “body’s going to stop working”.

“I wake up in the night screaming or crying or upset, terrified that it’s going to happen to me again, that my body’s going to stop working, that my catheter will get blocked, that I will be abandoned or lost,” he said.

“The nights are terrible to have PTSD, as many people who’ve suffered from accidents or trauma have. And I fear the nights. In the day, as you can see, I’m a normal, pretty reasonable person, but at night, it’s really, really frightening.”

Kureishi, who is currently working on a screen adaptation of Shattered, said that his injury forced him to realise that he is a “vulnerable human being, like you all are”.

“Our narcissism can’t guarantee our safety,” he said.

The Hay Festival is being held in partnership with The Independent for the second year running, and sees leading cultural figures deliver talks and panel discussions.

Throughout the festival, The Independent is hosting The News Review, a series of morning panels during which our journalists will discuss current affairs and headlines with standout figures from the arts, politics, science and comedy.