Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent.

Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.

After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. On 12 August 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto the stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at an event in Chautauqua, New York.

In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 1999. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He 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 events following The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Biography

Early life and family background

Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on 19 June 1947 during the British Raj, into an Indian Kashmiri Muslim family. He is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge-educated lawyer-turned-businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher. Rushdie's father was dismissed from the Indian Civil Services (ICS) after it emerged that the birth certificate submitted by him had changes to make him appear younger than he was Rushdie has three sisters. He wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes (Ibn Rushd).

Rushdie grew up in Bombay and was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort, South Bombay, before moving to England to attend Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, and then King's College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

Personal life

Rushdie has married five times and divorced four times, and has had at least one other significant relationship. He was first married to Clarissa Luard, literature officer of the Arts Council of England, from 1976 to 1987. The couple had a son, Zafar, born in 1979, who is married to the London-based jazz singer Natalie Rushdie. He left Clarissa Luard in the mid-1980s for the Australian writer Robyn Davidson, to whom he was introduced by their common friend Bruce Chatwin. Rushdie and Davidson never married, and they had split up by the time his divorce from Clarissa came through in 1987. Rushdie's second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was British editor and author Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan, born in 1997. In 2004, very shortly after his third divorce, Rushdie married Padma Lakshmi, an Indian-born actress, model, and host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. Rushdie stated that Lakshmi had asked for a divorce in January 2007, and later that year, in July, the couple filed it. In 2021, Rushdie married American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

In 1999, Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a problem with the levator palpebrae superioris muscle that causes drooping of the upper eyelid. According to Rushdie, it made it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all", he said.

Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, mostly near Union Square in Lower Manhattan, New York City. He is a fan of the English football club Tottenham Hotspur.

Career

Copywriter

Rushdie worked as a copywriter for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker (until 1982), for whom he wrote the line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. Collaborating with musician Ronnie Bond, Rushdie wrote the words for an advertising record on behalf of the now defunct Burnley Building Society that was recorded at Good Earth Studios, London. The song was called "The Best Dreams" and was sung by George Chandler. It was while at Ogilvy that Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer.

Literary work

Early works and literary breakthrough

Rushdie's first novel, Grimus (1975), a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children (1981), catapulted him to literary notability. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years. Midnight's Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, the author refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating, “People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you. In that sense, I've never felt that I've written an autobiographical character.”

After Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame (1983), in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Kashmiri diaspora.

Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called The Jaguar Smile. This book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments. He became interested in Nicaragua after he had been a neighbour of Madame Somoza, wife of the former Nicaraguan dictator, and his son Zafar was born around the time of the Nicaraguan revolution.

Later works: Novels and Essays (2015-2023)

2015 saw the publication of Rushdie's novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, a shift back to his old beloved style of magic realism. This novel is designed in the structure of a Chinese mystery box with different layers. Based on the central conflict of scholar Ibn Rushd (from whom Rushdie's family name derives), Rushdie goes on to explore several themes of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism by depicting a war of the universe which a supernatural world of jinns also accompanies.

In 2017, The Golden House, a satirical novel set in contemporary America, was published. 2019 saw the publication of Rushdie's fourteenth novel Quichotte, inspired by Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel Don Quixote.

In 2021 Languages of Truth, a collection of essays written between 2003 and 2020 was published.

Rushdie's fifteenth novel Victory City, described as an epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, was published in February 2023. The book is Rushdie's first released work since he was attacked and injured in 2022.

Awards, honours and recognition

Salman Rushdie has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany, and many of literature's highest honours.

Awards and honours include:

Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1993).
Booker Prize (1981).
Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Liège, Belgium (1999).
Golden PEN Award.
Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award (2014).
Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Indiana University (2018).
Honorary Doctor of Letters from Emory University (2015).
James Joyce Award from University College Dublin (2008).
Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Cultural Humanism from Harvard University (2007).
PEN Pinter Prize (UK).
St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.
Swiss Freethinkers Award 2019.

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)

Childrens's books

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

Essays and nonfiction

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
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)
Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)
Languages of Truth: Essays 2003–2020 (2021)