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From the start, Hanif Kureishi’s writing career has been marked by outrage. He doesn’t seem weary of this, but he is certainly used to it. “I try to engage with the contemporary,” he says demurely by way of explanation for his radical oeuvre, which, inter alia, has examined race and homosexuality, pensioners and sex, and Islamic fundamentalism.

Last week Radio 4 cancelled a broadcast of his short story Weddings and Beheadings, a fictional account of an Iraqi film-maker forced to document hostage decapitations. The story is shortlisted for the £15,000 National Short Story prize (the five finalists are aired on Radio 4) and the winner will be announced tomorrow. After unconfirmed reports that Alan Johnston, the BBC’s kidnapped Gaza correspondent, had been executed by a jihadist group Mark Damazer, Radio 4’s controller, pulled the plug on the scheduled broadcast of Kureishi’s tale.

“He rang me up,” says Kureishi, his eyes sparkling with irritation, “and said, ‘Hanif, hope you don’t mind . . . what with circumstances being what they are . . . we are terribly sorry . . . hope you understand’. I said, ‘I understand your reasons, but I disagree with your position. I don’t like censorship and I don’t think Alan Johnston’s position is served by having more censorship’.”

He pauses. “The BBC has cancelled my story out of a rather misplaced feeling for Alan Johnston. He is in a terrible situation. But my feeling is that, as journalists and writers, we support other journalists and writers by speaking freely. He is a hardcore news journalist. He wouldn’t want a bit of nancy censorship to support him.”

A brief phone call with Damazer clarifies that “nancy censorship” is not quite the case. “Our every intention is to broadcast it,” Damazer tells me crisply, “but I can’t tell you precisely when.”

“It is censorship,” says Kureishi. “I wrote it two years ago! It’s already been made into a film by Channel 4 and shown on television. So it’s not even a response to hearing Johnston had been taken.”

However “nancy” Damazer’s decision was, the 1,000-word story is powerful and harrowing. At one point the narrator talks about a decapitated head being held up, and “streaming with blood”. Kureishi is unrepentant. “It is visceral, yes. It’s supposed to engage people. Shocking people is one of the things writers do.”

He says he has received many letters of support. “From people asking me whether it is like this all the time in the BBC, what else is being censored? As writers we are all trying to approach the truth and come to terms with the fact that the world is pretty dark and horrible. The BBC has become lily-livered. It doesn’t want to get into trouble.” Particularly, notes Kureishi, with multicultural issues.

“It is very politically correct,” he continues. “It is frightened of offending people and frightened of offending Muslims.” This is a serious charge, especially given the furore surrounding the publication of cartoons of Muhammad deemed offensive across the Muslim world. The charge of self-censorship on such issues is an attack on our freedom of speech.

But what about the Beeb’s policy of positively seeking to employ ethnic minorities? What about its bespoke Asian output such as the Asian radio network? Kureishi discards all that. Token liberalism, he calls it.

“It is always trying to get more black people to work there, which I think is rather patronising. And the Asian network? It’s like being told to go over there in the Asian corner with the other Asians. I find that rather . . . despicable, really.”

He is far more approving of an institution such as Channel 4 which, he says, takes its multiculturalism much more profoundly.

Kureishi is clearly a moral absolutist who has worked out an intellectual stance on almost anything you care to lob his way and who doesn’t care who or what he criticises. He talks of writing as if it is an act of compulsion more than pleasure.

“I write about things which are interesting to me and which are transgressive,” he says. Certainly his controversial film The Mother, depicting a grandmother’s affair with a virile young carpenter, was transgressive, as was his screenplay for Venus, a film that dealt with a septuagenarian man lusting after a 19-year-old babe. Not to mention My Beautiful Laundrette, an early film that showed two men kissing and caused outrage at the time.

Does his urge to shock come from some relish for the public nervousness his “transgressive” stories cause? “It’s not my intention to annoy people. That would be silly. I want to write as well as I can and tell the stories I want to tell.”

But while a grandmother getting it on with the carpenter might horrify some it’s not as generally horrific as a black comedy about the decapitation of hostages. There might be quite a lot of people sympathising with Radio 4.

“Weddings and Beheadings is a story about a bloke who is in a pitiful position,” he says. “He wants to make films but he is dragged into making videos of people being beheaded. It’s a metaphor for the way people are dragged into war. He has to watch these beheadings every day. The world is a horrible place and the Iraq war has made it an even worse place. But our government did it. You should be able to tell stories about it. Not just to shock people but to try and think about what is going on.”

Has he ever seen a decapitation himself? “I have never watched any of them. I have never had any desire to see them. And the story isn’t about them, anyway. It’s about what it would be like to be the bloke behind the camera, the man whose hands are shaking, who is only there because he knows how to operate a camera. That seemed like a good way of dealing with some of the things that are going on in Iraq. That’s the point of view I wanted. Of someone on the margins, someone on the edge.”

He is now a lauded man of letters, with an Oscar nomination in 1985 (for My Beautiful Laundrette) and a Bafta win in 1994 (for The Buddha of Suburbia), but when he started out Kureishi admits his own position was extremely marginal. Before My Beautiful Laundrette was released, he says the notion that a British Asian writer might write a film about his community was unheard of. “I was often told by people, ‘Why don’t you stop doing all this Asian stuff?’ It wasn’t until Laundrette or when Salman Rushdie published Midnight’s Children that our community had a voice.

“The world’s jails are full of artists, writers and journalists. It’s not only about Alan Johnston. There are writers from China, Turkey, everywhere. We aren’t helping them by increasing censorship. We have to carry on working and being strong,” he says, as if Radio 4 was actively endangering his liberty. “If [Damazer] had broadcast it, people would have said what a brave thing to do, what a brave man. Even if he got attacked for it. Dropping things isn’t brave.”

But I tell him Damazer insists it has only been postponed. He laughs. “Damazer kept saying, ‘We know things that you don’t’. It’s like Blair! Blair always says, ‘If you knew what I knew’ the whole time. And you think, well, if you gave us the information then this would be a democracy.”

At this he leaves the cafe. But not before our waitress, grabbing a newspaper with his picture in it, begs an autograph.

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