Hanif Kureishi, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter and novelist, has revealed that he has been left without the use of his arms and legs after taking a near-fatal fall in Rome last month on Boxing Day (December 26).
Kureishi reported that after the fall it is “unclear whether I will ever be able to walk again, or whether I’ll ever be able to hold a pen.”
The 68-year-old writer of “My Beautiful Laundrette” said in a series of tweets, with the assistance of his son, that he collapsed after feeling dizzy following a walk through the Italian capital and woke up a few minutes later in a “pool of blood” with his neck in “a grotesquely twisted position.”
Shortly after he regained consciousness, he felt as though there was "no coordination between what was left of my mind and what remained of my body. I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying."
“I believed I was dying,” he wrote. “I believed I had three breathes left.”
Kureishi, the author of 'Buddha of Suburbia', which won the Whitbread first novel award in 1990, and the screenwriter of 'My Beautiful Laundrette', for which he was nominated by the Academy, was born in South London to an English mother and a Pakistani father, whose family hailed from Madras and moved to Pakistan after the Partition.
Sharing updates on his condition from his hospital bed, he said that an operation on his spine has led to “minor improvements in the last few days” and “sensation and some movement in all my limbs..” He said he was in the Gemelli hospital in Rome and would “begin physio and rehabilitation as soon as possible.”
On 9 January, he tweeted: "I sat up today. I sat up today."
"Four physiotherapists came to my room. They started to move me with the determination of putting my feet flat on the floor. They turned me, and for a moment I sat on the bed staring ahead of me. I have to say, I felt proud and amazed and incredibly dizzy."
Kureishi said that British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed during a literary event a few months ago, wrote to him "every single day." "My friend Salman Rushdie, one of the bravest men I know, a man who has stood up to the most evil form of Islamofascism, writes to me every single day, encouraging patience. He should know. He gives me courage."
London-born Kureishi asked his Twitter followers for assistance with “voice assisted hardware and software" which will allow him to "watch, write and begin work again, and continue some kind of half life.”
He is the author of seven novels as well as a number of short stories, essays, plays and screenplays.