After the Fall: Hanif Kureishi on Trauma, Recovery and What It Means to Be a Writer

On Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall.

Sitting at a table in Isabella’s living room with my iPad in front of me, I had just seen Mo Salah score against Aston Villa. I was sipping a beer when I began to feel dizzy. I leant forward and put my head between my legs; I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, Isabella on her knees beside me.

I then experienced what can only be described as a scooped, semicircular object with talons scuttling towards me. Using what was left of my reason, I saw this was one of my hands, an uncanny thing over which I had no agency.

It occurred to me that there was no coordination between my mind and what remained of my body. I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying, that I had three breaths left. It seemed like a miserable and ignoble way to go.

People say when you’re about to die your life passes before your eyes, but for me it wasn’t the past but the future that I thought about—everything I was being robbed of, all the things I wanted to do.

*

Isabella and I live in London but we were staying in her apartment in Rome for Christmas, and it was there that I had my fall, sitting at the large round table, covered in books and papers, where she and I work together in the mornings.

From the bathroom, she heard my frantic shout, came in and called an ambulance. She saved my life and kept me calm, crouching down beside me. I told her I wanted to FaceTime my three sons and say goodbye, but Isabella said it wasn’t a good idea, it would frighten and appall them.

For a few days I was profoundly traumatized, altered and unrecognizable to myself.

Now I am in the Gemelli Hospital, Rome. I cannot move my arms and legs. I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself. As you can imagine, this is both humiliating and degrading, making me a burden for others. According to my hospital report, my fall resulted in neck hyperextension and immediate tetraplegia. An MRI scan showed a severe stenosis of the vertebral canal with signs of spinal cord injury from C3 to C5. In layman’s terms, the vertebrae at the top of my spine suffered a kind of whiplash. I’ve had an operation on my neck to relieve compression on my spine where the injury is, and have shown minor motor improvements.

I have sensation and some movement in all my limbs, I did not have what they call a ‘complete break.’ I will begin physio and rehabilitation as soon as possible.

At the moment, it is unclear whether I will be able to walk again, or if I’ll ever be able to hold a pen. I am speaking these words through Isabella, who is slowly typing them into her iPad. I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.

*

I wasn’t a happy child but I wasn’t an unhappy one either. Once I could read I was free. I could go to libraries every day, often accompanied by my mother, and I saw that books were a way out of my immediate surroundings.

Soon I learned to cycle. Alone, I could explore the streets and fields of the countrified semi-suburbs in which I grew up. It was a county called Kent, which had been bombed to hell not long before I was born.

In those days parents were less policelike. They gave you a penny at the beginning of the day and didn’t expect to see you until the evening. I cycled all day, stopped where I wanted and talked to anyone who had a story for me. I am still like that.

The third element in my liberation was the discovery of my father’s typing manual. My father himself had been a journalist and was writing fiction. His vigorous typing in his sexy shirtsleeves seemed impressive.

One day he bought a little portable typewriter in a blue case of which he was incredibly proud. He swung it round and round, because it was light, and suddenly announced he was going to Vietnam to be a war correspondent like Hemingway or Norman Mailer.

I started to blindfold myself with my school tie and found I could type the correct words in order without looking.

It was exhilarating. I had been reading Crime and Punishment at the time, always a cheery go to book for a young man, and as practice I began to copy out pages from this great novel.

At school I had been a disaster, but at last I had found something I could do. I never had the desire to write underwater stories, adventure stories or amazing tales involving giants, dwarfs, elves or mermaids.

I didn’t know much about those things, but I did know the people around me. And I guess that made me into something of a realist. One day, looking out of the window at school, I called myself a writer.

I found the title suited me like a good shirt. I was keen for others to apply the word to me even though I hadn’t yet written anything.

After all, at school many words had already been applied to me, words like ‘Brownie, ’ or ‘Paki,’ or ‘Shitface,’ so I found my own word, I stuck to it, and never let it go. It is still my word.

Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.

The last time a medical digit entered my backside was a few years ago. As the nurse flipped me over she asked, “How long did it take you to write Midnight’s Children?” I replied, “If I had indeed written that, don’t you think I would have gone private?”

*

Before my accident, when I woke up in the morning, the first thing I would do is make my coffee and go upstairs to my desk, which overlooks the street. Around the edge of the desk, in various pots and old coffee cups, I have dozens of fountain pens, pencils, markers; I also have many bottles of ink, in numerous colors, from the ludicrous to the sober.

I would pick up a pen and make a mark on a page of good thick paper, then make another mark, write a word, a sentence and another sentence, until I felt something waking up inside me. The writing zigzagged across the page in multicolors, as though there had been an accident in a schoolroom.

As I made these marks, I began to hear characters speaking; if I was lucky they might start talking to each other, or even amusing one another. I would feel excited and that my life had meaning at last.

I’m sure painters, architects and gardeners love their tools, and see them as an extension of their body. I hope one day I will be able to go back to using my own precious and beloved instruments.

Excuse me, I’m being injected in my belly with something called Heparina, a blood thinner.

I find that writing by hand, moving my wrist across the page—the feeling of skin on paper—is more like drawing than typing. I wouldn’t want to write directly into a machine, it’s too formal.

After a while, one word will push out another word, followed by another word, and more words and sentences may follow. I sit at my desk in my swirly Paul Smith pajamas, and after an hour something I can use may have emerged.

When I read it through, something usually attracts my attention, which I can develop. I guess this method is now known as free writing or free association. You start with nothing and after some time you find yourself in a new place.

My hands continue to feel like alien objects. They’re swollen, I cannot open or close them, and when they are under the sheets, I could not tell you where they are precisely. They may in fact be in another building altogether, having a drink with friends.

I have been moved from the ICU to a small grim side room. There is a picture of the Virgin Mary ahead of me, and the view outside the window, which I cannot see myself, is of a car park, motorway, and Roman pine trees, which look like parasols. I tell Isabella the place hasn’t been decorated since Hemingway left.

I was low yesterday. Trying to dictate these words to Isabella, I became impatient with the slowness of the process. She is Italian and English is her second language, so she doesn’t always get what I say.

Carlo Kureishi, the second of my twin sons, has now flown out to Italy, and is helping me with this dictation. He is in his late twenties and, like me, read philosophy at university. He enjoys movies and sport and is starting to make his way as a screenwriter. What I like about him is that he can type quickly. Normally, of course, I can write this stuff up myself. I can even spell.

Isabella and I have started to argue. She is in the hospital with me all day, and is looking tired and thin, as she would in the circumstance of this terrible strain. When she turned to me and asked, “Would you have ever done this for me?” I couldn’t answer. I don’t know.

Our relationship has taken a new turn, not one we could have anticipated, and we will have to find a new way of loving each other. At the moment, I have no idea how to do this.

A few months ago, Apple Music, on behalf of the Beatles, asked me to write an introduction to their book Get Back, to coincide with the release of Peter Jackson’s Beatles series on Disney. For a long time I was stumped. What more could there be to say about the Beatles?

And then it occurred to me that those four boys, with their numerous collaborators, were able to do things together that they couldn’t do apart. This is both a miracle and a terrible dependency. In my experience, all artists are collaborationists.

If you are not collaborating with a particular individual, you are collaborating with the history of the medium, and you’re also collaborating with the time, politics and culture within which you exist. There are no individuals.

In this somewhat desolate Roman hospital, in a suburb of Rome, I am writing these words to try to reach someone, and I am, at the same time, attempting to connect with Isabella, to make a new relationship out of an old one. You’d think I’d have enough on my plate.

I wish what had happened to me had never happened, but there isn’t a family on the planet that will evade catastrophe or disaster. But out of these unexpected breaks, there must be new opportunities for creativity.

If you were with me tonight, my reader, we would each pour a large vodka with a juicy mixer and drink and embrace each other with a little hope.

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From Shattered: A Memoir by Hanif Kureishi. Copyright © 2025. Available from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.