Students on Kingston University's creative writing course must be wondering if they chose wisely when they signed up to be taught by Hanif Kureishi. Best known for his 1990 novel, The Buddha of Suburbia and his debut movie, My Beautiful Laundrette, Kureishi will have been the course's star attraction, an intellectually and emotionally agile writer unafraid to tell his truth.

Last weekend, however, his charges may consider the truth-telling went too far. He told the Hay Festival that “writing courses, particularly when they have the word ‘creative' in them, are the new mental hospitals” and noted that it always seemed to be student writers who were responsible for campus massacres in America. To be on the safe side, he gives all his undergraduates a uniform 71 per cent. It was inevitable that Kureishi would eventually turn on his own; the brotherhood of writers had it coming from him as surely as his family. His late father, Shannoo, who toiled in the Pakistan Embassy in London, was an early target, fictionalised in Laundrette, where he never gets out of his pyjamas, and in The Buddha, where he is mocked for his “aristocratic uselessness”. In his later memoir, My Ear at His Heart, Kureishi recalled that Shannoo liked the novel, although he considered his own work (all unpublished) “deeper”: “If he felt it was a disconcerting picture of himself he didn't say anything.” He died of a heart attack in 1991, a year after Buddha came out.

Tracey Scoffield, the mother of Kureishi's twins, Sachin and Carlo, whom he left when they were still infants, was less phlegmatic when in 1988 he published Intimacy, a ruthless account of the 24 hours before a writer, much like himself, leaves his family for a superior “f***”. In the book he wonders if she will find someone else, but does not imagine there will be a queue - although “the most grotesque people get laid, and even married”. A play, Sleep with Me, rehashing the affair, was savagely reviewed. It is to someone's credit that Scoffield and he are now on reasonable terms and their twins are frequent visitors to his home in Shepherd's Bush, shared with the woman for whom he left their mother.

Other Kureishi targets have included Islam, which he has compared to National Socialism, Trevor Phillips, of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (“an Uncle Tom”) and, most recently, the old, whose ranks, at 52, he is no longer so far from. His latest film, Venus, features an old letch's fantasies about a young woman's breasts. He explains it is wrong to “dignify” old people with the idea that they have great wisdom.

“The job of the writer is to create argument and dissent...That's one's integrity and it's an integrity that involves letting other people down,” he once told me. Let us hope his Kingston University inmates understand, rather than reach for their shotguns.

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