Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is one of the leading Anglo-Indian novelists of the twentieth century, taking inspiration from a variety of genres in his writing. His style is often likened to magic realism, which mixes religion, fantasy, and mythology into reality. He has been compared to authors such as Peter Carey, Emma Tennant, and Angela Carter. The familiar way in which some of his works treat religion has provoked criticism, however, peaking in the Ayatollah of Iran issuing death threats in response to The Satanic Verses, his fourth novel.

Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, India to a middle class Muslim family. His father was a businessman, educated in Cambridge, and his grandfather was an Urdu poet. At fourteen, he was sent to England for schooling, attending the Rugby School in Warwickshire. In 1964, his family, responding to the growing hostilities between India and Pakistan, joined many emigrating Muslims and moved to Karachi, Pakistan.

The religious and political conflicts of his homeland affected Rushdie deeply, although he stayed in England to attend the King’s College in Cambridge and studying history. While in school, he also joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. Following graduation, in 1968 he began working in Pakistani television. Later, he also acted in the Oval House theatre group in Kennington, England, and until 1981, he wrote freelance copy for advertisers Ofilvy and Mather and Charles Barker.

In 1975, Rushdie published his first novel. Grimus, a science fiction story inspired by the twelfth century Sufi poem “The Conference of the Birds,” was largely ignored by both critics and the public. Rushdie’s literary fortunes changed in 1981. The publication of his second novel Midnight’s Children brought him international fame and acclaim. The story is a comic allegory of Indian history, and involves the 1001 children born after India’s Declaration of Independence, each of whom possesses a magical power. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the English-Speaking Union Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (fiction), an Arts Council Writers’ Award, and in 1993 and 2008, was named the “Booker of Bookers,” acknowledging it as the best recipient of the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award’s history.

His third novel, [Shame] (1983), was commonly regarded as a political allegory of Pakistani politics, using a wealthy family as a metaphor for the country and basing two of its characters on former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. It won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and made the short list for the Booker Prize. In 1987, he published a short travel narrative titled The Jaguar’s Smile.

In 1988, Rushdie became the center of a controversy surrounding the publication of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which revolves around two Indian actors who struggle with religion, spirituality, and nationality. Although the book won the Whitbread Award, Rushdie’s free use of Islamic history and theology caused the orthodox Muslim Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran to issue of a fatwa, a call to all obedient Muslims to assassinate him. The book was banned and burned in many countries, and several people involved with its publication were injured and killed. After the death threat, Rushdie shunned publicity and went into hiding for many years, although he continued to write.

He published a book of children’s stories in 1990 titled Haroun and the Sea of Stories which won the Writers’ Guild Award (Best Children’s Book), followed by a collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991), and a collection of short stories, East, West (1994). Then came another novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), which used a family’s history to explore the activities of right-wing Hindu terrorists and the cultural connections between India and the Iberian peninsula. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) was Rushdie’s sixth novel, re-imagining the birth of modern rock music. He also published the novel Fury in 2001 and Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 in 2002. His latest work is the novel Shalimar the Clown, published in 2005 and a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards.

Rushdie ended his fourth marriage to the American television star Padma Lakshmi in 2007. He is Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, Distinguished Fellow in Literature at the University of Anglia, recipient of the 1993 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, recipient of the 1996 Aristeion Literary Prize, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur de Arts et des Lettres. He was also President of PEN American Center from 2003-2005. In 2000, he moved from London to New York. In 2006, he became the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.