In 1981 Hanif Kureishi was voted Most Promising Playwright of the Year by the London Theatre Critics for his plays Borderline and Outskirts. This selection of original works shows his development as a writer, finding his own subject and establishing his characteristically powerful and humorous style, before moving into film with My Beautiful Laundrette. In his extended and witty introduction, Kureishi looks at the work from the perspective of his own experience and what made him want to work in the theatre at that time, while assessing the significance of radical British theatre during the seventies and his own writing in this context.