Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie
On 22 October 2023, Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in the Paulskirche (Frankfurt am Main).
Occupation	Writer professor
Nationality	Indian (until 1964) British (from 1964) American (from 2016)
Education	King's College, Cambridge (Bachelor of Arts)
Genres	Magic realism Satire Postcolonialism
Subjects	Historical criticism Travel writing
Spouse(s)	Clarissa Luard (m. 1976; div. 1987)​ Marianne Wiggins (m. 1988; div. 1993)​ Elizabeth West (m. 1997; div. 2004)​ Padma Lakshmi (m. 2004; div. 2007)​ Rachel Eliza Griffiths (m. 2021)
Children	2
Relative(s)	Natalie Rushdie (daughter-in-law)

Ahmed Salman Rushdie (b. 19 June 1947 Bombay, British India) is an Indian-born novelist and essayist, partly educated in Britain where he lived for a time, later moving to the United States. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His novel The Satanic Verses (1988) was the subject of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death threats were made, including a fatwa (legal opinion on a point of Islamic law, sharia) calling for the assassination of Rushdie "along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents", issued by Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran. Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted in response to the novel. Also in Western countries, some Islamic individuals and organizations stated public support for the fatwa. The fatwa still stands, with there being a large reward for Rushdie's assassination.

Life

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie' second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989.

Rushdie was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, where he has worked at Emory University and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the controversy over The Satanic Verses.

The Satanic Verses

This book follows two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood superstar who specializes in playing Hindu deities, and Saladin Chamcha, an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England. The book opens with them both trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain. Th plane explodes over the English Channel but the two are magically saved but go through a miraculous transformation. Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gibreel, and Chamcha that of a devil. Both characters try to piece together their lives back together, but face many difficult challenges along the way, some of which they do overcome, some of which they don't. The book has been challenged by conservative Muslim groups who claim that the book makes a mockery of their religion. There have even been assassination attempts made on Rushdie's life.

Bibliography

Novels

• Grimus (1975)
• Midnight's Children (1981)
• Shame (1983)
• The Satanic Verses (1988)
• The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
• Fury (2001)
• Shalimar the Clown (2005)
• The Enchantress of Florence (2008)
• Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015)
• The Golden House (2017)
• Quichotte (2019)
• Victory City (2023)

Collections

• East, West (1994)
• Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997 (1997, Editor, with Elizabeth West)
• The Best American Short Stories (2008, Guest Editor)

Children's books

• Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
• Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)

Essays and nonfiction

• In Good Faith, Granta Books (1990)
• Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1992)
• The Wizard of Oz: BFI Film Classics, British Film Institute (1992)
• Mohandas Gandhi, Time (13 April 1998)
• Imagine There Is No Heaven (Extract from Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen, published in English by Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam)
• Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002)
• The East Is Blue (2004)
• "A fine pickle", The Guardian (28 February 2009)
• In the South, Booktrack (7 February 2012)
• Languages of Truth: Essays 2003–2020 (2021)

Memoirs

• The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
• Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)
• Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024)

See also

• Islamization and anti-Islamization

External links

• Salman Rushdie Official Author Website