Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie (born June 19, 1947, Bombay [now Mumbai], India) is an Indian-born writer whose allegorical novels examine historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humour, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. His treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects made him a controversial figure.

Rushdie, whose father was a prosperous Muslim businessman in India, was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, where he received an M.A. degree in history in 1968. Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising copywriter. His first published novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975. Rushdie’s next novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), a fable about modern India, was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. A film adaptation, for which he drafted the screenplay, was released in 2012.

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The novel Shame (1983), based on contemporary politics in Pakistan, was also popular, but Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, encountered a different reception. Some of the adventures in this book depict a character modeled on the Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and his transcription of the Qurʾān in a manner that, after the novel’s publication in the summer of 1988, drew criticism from Muslim community leaders in Britain, who denounced the novel as blasphemous. Public demonstrations against the book spread to Pakistan in January 1989. On February 14 the spiritual leader of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, publicly condemned the book and issued a fatwa (legal opinion) against Rushdie; a bounty was offered to anyone who would execute him. He went into hiding under the protection of Scotland Yard, and—although he occasionally emerged unexpectedly, sometimes in other countries—he was compelled to restrict his movements.

Despite the standing death threat, Rushdie continued to write, producing Imaginary Homelands (1991), a collection of essays and criticism; the children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990); the short-story collection East, West (1994); and the novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). In 1998, after nearly a decade, the Iranian government announced that it would no longer seek to enforce its fatwa against Rushdie. He recounted his experience in the third-person memoir Joseph Anton (2012); its title refers to an alias he adopted while in seclusion.

Following his return to public life, Rushdie published the novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001). Step Across This Line, a collection of essays he wrote between 1992 and 2002 on subjects ranging from the September 11 attacks to The Wizard of Oz, was issued in 2002. Rushdie’s subsequent novels include Shalimar the Clown (2005), an examination of terrorism that was set primarily in the disputed Kashmir region of the Indian subcontinent, and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), based on a fictionalized account of the Mughal emperor Akbar. The children’s book Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) centres on the efforts of Luka—younger brother to the protagonist of Haroun and the Sea of Stories—to locate the titular fire and revive his ailing father. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015) depicts the chaos ensuing from a rent in the fabric separating the world of humans from that of the Arabic mythological figures known as jinn. Reveling in folkloric allusion—the title references The Thousand and One Nights—the novel unfurls a tapestry of connected stories celebrating the human imagination.

In The Golden House (2017), Rushdie explored the immigrant experience in the United States through a wealthy Indian family that settles in New York City in the early 21st century. His next novel, Quichotte (2019), was inspired by Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Languages of Truth: Essays 2003–2020 appeared in 2021.

In August 2022 Rushdie was attacked and seriously injured while onstage in Chautauqua, New York. He had been scheduled to give a speech about the United States being a refuge for exiled artists. Rushdie faced a long recovery and ultimately lost one eye. In 2023 he released the acclaimed novel Victory City, which was completed before the attack. A work of magic realism, it opens in 14th-century India, where a nine-year-old girl becomes a vessel for a goddess and builds a thriving city known for its egalitarianism. However, greed and religious extremism ultimately lead to its ruination.

Rushdie received the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children. The novel subsequently won the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of the Booker (2008). These special prizes were voted on by the public in honour of the prize’s 25th and 40th anniversaries, respectively. Rushdie was knighted in 2007, an honour criticized by the Iranian government and Pakistan’s parliament. He became an American citizen in 2016.