Please Rewind Talent Wall

Ayub Khan-Din

Ayub Khan-Din’s career has never fitted neatly into a single category. Born in Salford, he trained in drama at Salford College of Technology before studying acting at London’s Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, graduating in 1984. He began in theatre and went on to work across British film and television during the late 1980s, including the co-lead role of Sammy in Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. His early screen work also included a leading role in The Idiot in 1992, while his stage career took him to the Royal National Theatre. By the mid-1990s, Khan-Din had begun writing plays, bringing an actor’s understanding of character to stories rooted in working-class family life and cultural tension. His first play, East is East, drew closely on his childhood in a large Salford family with a British Pakistani father and an English mother. First produced in 1996, it became a significant work in bringing Asian culture to mainstream British audiences and was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Khan-Din adapted East is East for the 1999 film starring Om Puri and Linda Bassett. His screenplay won British Independent Film and London Critics’ Circle awards, alongside BAFTA and European Film Award nominations. He later wrote the sequel, West is West, which moves the Khan family’s story to Pakistan and premiered at the Toronto and London film festivals in 2010. His work continued to move between stage and screen. Rafta, Rafta..., adapted from Bill Naughton’s All in Good Time, won the 2008 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and was later filmed as All in Good Time. Khan-Din also adapted E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love for the stage in 2013. Perhaps the clearest example of the connection between his acting and writing came in 2014, when he returned to East is East as a performer, playing George in a London revival opposite Jane Horrocks. It was a fitting turn in a career built on moving between performance and authorship, with Salford family life remaining close to its centre.