Hanif & Carlo Kureishi: Are You With Me Now?

Hanif Kureishi and his son Carlo Kureishi will be in conversation at Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday 1 November, with broadcaster Emma Barnett chairing. It's the closing event of the London Literature Festival, which this year is guest-curated by Dua Lipa and falls in the Southbank Centre's 75th anniversary year.

The evening centres on Hanif's book Are You With Me Now?, which he describes as a fiercely funny, unflinching account of survival — of creativity, desire and companionship persisting when the body and conventional life fall apart. The title comes from the song 'Are You with Me Now?', a regular soundtrack to the drives Kureishi and his partner Isabella d'Amico used to take from Rome to her mother's house on the Amalfi Coast, before the accident that paralysed him.

Kureishi is a novelist and screenwriter whose work has been translated into 36 languages. He wrote The Buddha of Suburbia, which won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, as well as The Black Album, Intimacy and The Last Word. His screenplays include My Beautiful Laundrette, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. He's also been awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

The talk starts at 8pm and runs for about an hour and 15 minutes. Standard entry is from £29, and it takes place at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX.