Salman Rushdie

Ahmed Salman Rushdie; born 19 June 1947 is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His 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 Eastern and Western civilizations.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the center of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. 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.

Partial 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)

Children's books

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

Tropes concerning Rushdie and his work

Hatedom: As noted above, The Satanic Verses gained him a huge one in the Muslim world.