Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie (born June 19, 1947, Bombay [now Mumbai], India) is an Indian-born British-American writer whose allegorical novels examine historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humor, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. Because of his treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects, particularly in his novel The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie has been the target of death threats and violent attacks and a central figure in debates about free speech and censorship.

Early life and first novels

Rushdie, whose father was a prosperous Muslim businessman in India, was educated in England at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, where he received a master’s 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.

The Satanic Verses and life under the fatwa

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. The book faced bans and opposition in many countries. The Indian government issued a ban on the import of the book on October 5, 1988. 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. A string of assassination attempts and killings followed the book’s publication. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the work, was murdered in 1991. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, survived a knife attack the same year, while William Nygaard, who published the book in Norway, was shot in 1993 but survived.

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In November 2024 the Delhi High Court overturned the 1988 ban on the import of The Satanic Verses due to an extraordinary situation—the original notification was untraceable. A petition was filed in 2019 by an individual who attempted to import the book or acquire it through unofficial channels. The case took a pivotal turn when he requested a copy of the original notification under India’s Right to Information Act. However, all efforts by government officials to locate the document proved futile. The missing notification led the bench to assume that no such notification exists. With the ban lifted, readers in India will be able to import the book; however, further decisions on its distribution and sale are still under consideration.

Post-fatwa writings

Despite the standing death threat, Rushdie continued to write after 1988, 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) centers 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.

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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.

2022 attempt on life

In August 2022 Rushdie was attacked and seriously injured while onstage at a literary event 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 had been 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 the city’s ruination. In 2024 Rushdie released Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, a memoir of the attack and his subsequent recovery.

Honors and personal life

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 honor of the prize’s 25th and 40th anniversaries, respectively. In 2004 Rushdie married model, television personality, and cookbook author Padma Lakshmi; the couple divorced in 2007. That same year Rushdie was knighted, an honor that was criticized by the Iranian government and Pakistan’s parliament. He became a U.S. citizen in 2016 but has also retained his British citizenship. In 2021 he married poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. It was Rushdie’s fifth marriage.