RUSHDIE, Salman

“A POET'S WORK IS TO NAME THE UNNAMEABLE, TO POINT AT FRAUDS, TO TAKE SIDES, START ARGUMENTS, SHAPE THE WORLD, AND STOP IT GOING TO SLEEP.”

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947, eight weeks before Indian independence and partition. He was educated at The Cathedral School in Bombay and later at Rugby, before going up to Kings College, Cambridge where he took a degree in history.

Having failed to get a start as an actor in London, Rushdie took a job in advertising and set to writing novels in the evenings.  His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975, but it was his second novel, Midnight’s Children, that won him both critical and popular acclaim in 1981. It took the Booker Prize that year, the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008, deeming it the best novel to ever win the prize.

In September 1988 Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, winning the Whitbread Award and a Booker shortlisting. On Valentine’s Day the following year, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death for the novel's passages about a fictional prophet called Mahound. This death warrant forced Rushdie into hiding for eleven years under the name Joseph Anton, wedding the first names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995 confirmed his return to literary life and took the Whitbread Prize as well as earning Rushdie another Booker shortlisting. In June 2007 he was knighted for services to Literature.

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