Knight Bachelor
The insignia of a Knight Bachelor devised in 1926
Awarded by the Queen of the United Kingdom
Awarded for	At the monarch's pleasure
Status	Currently constituted
Sovereign	HM The Queen
Grades (w/ post-nominals)	Knight
Established	11th century
Precedence
Next (higher)	Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Next (lower)	Lower level judges, et al.
Ribbon for a Knight Bachelor

The rank of Knight Bachelor (Kt.) is a part of the British honours system. It is the most basic rank of a man who has been knighted by the monarch but not as a member of one of the organised Orders of Chivalry. Knights Bachelor are the most ancient sort of British knight (the rank existed during the 13th century reign of King Henry III), but Knights Bachelor rank below knights of the various orders. There is no female counterpart; women deserving an honour of this rank are appointed Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) instead.

Criteria[link]

It is generally awarded for public service; amongst its recipients are all male judges of the High Court of England and Wales. It is possible to be a Knight Bachelor and a junior member of an order of chivalry without being a knight of that order; this situation has become rather common, especially among those recognised for achievements in entertainment. For instance, Sir Elton John, Sir Bruce Forsyth, Sir Tom Stoppard and Sir Christopher Lee are Commanders of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), Sir Patrick Stewart is an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and Sir Paul McCartney is a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). None of them would be entitled to the honorific "Sir" by virtue of their Order of the British Empire honours. However, all are also Knights Bachelor and thus each may preface their name with that title.

Honorifics and post-nominals[link]

Like other knights, Knights Bachelor are styled "Sir". Since they are not knights of any order of chivalry, there is no post-nominal associated with the award.^[1] However, when the style "Sir" is awkward or incomplete due to a subsequent appointment, recipients may sometimes use the word "Knight" or "Kt" (note the lowercase 't', which distinguishes it from "KT", the post-nominals of a Knight of the Thistle) after their name in formal documents to signify that they have the additional honour. This style is often adopted by Knights Bachelor who are also peers, baronets or knights of the various statutory orders (e.g. Sir William Boulton, Bt., Kt.).^[2][3]

Insignia[link]

Until 1926 Knights Bachelor had no insignia which they could wear, but in that year King George V issued a Warrant authorising the wearing of a badge on all appropriate occasions. The Knights Bachelor badge may be worn on all such occasions upon the left side of the coat or outer garment of those upon whom the degree of Knight Bachelor has been conferred. Measuring 2³⁄₈ inches in length and 1³⁄₈ inches in width, it is described in heraldic terms as follows:

Upon an oval medallion of vermilion, enclosed by a scroll a cross-hilted sword belted and sheathed, pommel upwards, between two spurs, rowels upwards, the whole set about with the sword belt, all gilt.

In 1974, Queen Elizabeth II issued a further warrant authorising the wearing on appropriate occasions of a neck badge, slightly smaller in size, and in miniature. In 1988 a new certificate of authentication, a knight's only personal documentation, was designed by the College of Arms.

Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor[link]

The Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor was founded for the maintenance and consolidation of the Dignity of Knights Bachelor in 1908, and obtained official recognition from the Sovereign in 1912. The Society keeps records of all Knights Bachelor, in their interest.

See also[link]

• Bachelor
• Knight banneret
• Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood
• British honours system: Knighthood

Notes[link]

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Knight Bachelor

• Insignia of knights bachelor - Website of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor
• The UK Honours System- Website UK Government
• Debrett's

Sir David Chipperfield
Born	(1953-12-18) 18 December 1953 (age 58) London, England
Nationality	British
Awards	RIBA Stirling Prize, Royal Gold Medal, Andrea Palladio Prize, Tessenow Gold Medal
Work
Practice	David Chipperfield Architects
Buildings	River and Rowing Museum, Henley-on-Thames
Projects	America's Cup Building, Valencia, Spain

Sir David Alan Chipperfield CBE, RA, RDI, RIBA (born 18 December 1953) is a British architect, born in London. He has offices in London, Berlin and Milan, and a representative office in Shanghai. Uncompromisingly modernist in outlook, his practice is driven by a consistent philosophical approach, rather than a 'house style'.^{[citation needed]}

Career[link]

Chipperfield studied Architecture at Kingston Polytechnic, graduating in 1976 along with the Architectural Association in London. He worked at the practices of Douglas Stephen, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, and in 1984 established his own practice, David Chipperfield Architects. The practice — which has offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai^[1] — has over 250 staff from 15 countries, working on a variety of projects in Europe, the United States and China.

Work[link]

The River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames.

Housing building in Madrid (Spain), 2005.

Chipperfield first made his reputation in Japan in the 1980s.^[2] Among his early projects in England that revealed his rigorous and elemental approach to design included a shop for Issey Miyake on London's Sloane Street in 1983, and a house for the fashion photographer Nick Knight.^[3] Later, Chipperfield designed the award-winning River and Rowing Museum^[4] in Henley-on-Thames using green oak cladding, concrete and glass. Chipperfield was the only British architect to be shortlisted for the commission to design Tate Modern.

Since then, Chipperfield has moved on to become one of the commanding figures in the design of cultural and civic buildings across Europe and in the United States.^[3] Chipperfield was the architect for the reconstruction of the destroyed Neues Museum in Berlin, which reopened in October 2009. In addition to the Neues Museum, which Chipperfield began working on in the mid-1990s during an initial competition phase, the architect is also designing the master plan for Berlin's entire Museum Island, a Unesco World Heritage site, made up of five museums. A new entrance building, which will act as an addition to the complex, has also been designed by Chipperfield and is expected to be completed in 2013.^[1]

Since the 2000s, he has worked extensively in the United States, where in 2005, he completed the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, as well as the Central Public Library in Des Moines, Iowa, commissioned in 2001. Current projects include the Anchorage Museum Expansion in Anchorage, Alaska and four lake side villas at Bom Sucesso Design Resort, Portugal.

In 2009, the architect caused controversy for imposing restrictions of photographs in one of its buildings, the Des Moines Public Library.^[5]

Chipperfield has taught architecture in Europe and the United States, and has lectured extensively on the work of the practice, including as Professor of Architecture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart from 1995 to 2001.^[6] In addition Chipperfield held the Mies van der Rohe Chair at the Escola Tècnica, in Barcelona, Spain, and the Norman R. Foster Professorship of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture. He is a visiting professor at the University of the Arts London (formerly London Institute). He has been on the Board of Trustees of The Architecture Foundation.

Early in his career, Chipperfiled established (in collaboration with Wilfried Wang and Ricky Burdett) an architectural gallery called 9H, named after the hardest kind of pencil, which was created to bring wider attention to what were then obscure European firms, such as Herzog and de Meuron, Álvaro Siza, Rafael Moneo, Luigi Snozzi, and Mario Botta.^[2] In 2000, Chipperfield was one of the architects to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. The first British architect in this position, he is to curate the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.^[7]

Recognition[link]

In 1999, David Chipperfield was awarded the Tessenow Gold Medal, what was followed by a comprehensive exhibition of his work together with the work of the Tessenow Stipendiat and Spanish architect Andrés Jaque, held in the Hellerau Festspielhaus. In 2004 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to architecture, and was made Honorary Member of the Florence Academy of Art and Design in 2003. In 2009 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.^[6] He was knighted in the 2010 New Year Honours for services to architecture in the UK and Germany.^[4][8] He was awarded the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2010 and the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2011.^[9] Awarded .

"Form Matters," an exhibition looking back over Chipperfield's career, was mounted by London's Design Museum in 2009. His Tonale range of ceramics for Alessi received the Compassod’Oro in 2011, and the Piana folding chair has recently been acquired for the permanent collection at MoMA.^[6]

Selected works[link]

• River and Rowing Museum, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK (1989–1997)
• Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, USA (1999–2005)
• Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach, Germany (2002–2006)
• America's Cup Building, Valencia, Spain (2005–2006)
• Liangzhu Culture Museum, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China (2007)
• Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent, UK (2011)
• The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK (2011)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: David Chipperfield

• David Chipperfield Architects
• Gallery: David Chipperfield Projects
• Chipperfield Shore Villas on Dellis Cay
• House in Corrubedo (Galicia) (with drawings)
• Article (07/2006), The Guardian
• Interview (07/2007), The Daily Telegraph
• Bom Sucesso Design Resort — Óbidos, Portugal
• Central Library — Des Moines, Iowa
• Exhibition at The Design Museum, London SE1, 0ctober 2009 – January 2010

Aldous Huxley
Born	Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-07-26)26 July 1894 Godalming, Surrey, England
Died	22 November 1963(1963-11-22) (aged 69) Los Angeles, California, United States
Resting place	Compton, Surrey, England
Occupation	Writer (fiction & non-fiction)
Notable work(s)	Brave New World, Island, Point Counter Point, The Doors of Perception, The Perennial Philosophy
Influences Swami Prabhavananda, J. Krishnamurti, F. Matthias Alexander, Montaigne, Yevgeny Zamyatin, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Thomas Malthus, Vilfredo Pareto, H. G. Wells, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Traherne, William Law, Gerald Heard, D. H. Lawrence
Influenced Christopher Isherwood, Michel Houellebecq, Jim Morrison, George Orwell, Huston Smith, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Leon Kass, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Merton, Cyril Connolly, Gerald Heard, Isaiah Berlin
Signature

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. Huxley spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.

Aldous Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism.^[1][2] He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics.

By the end of his life Huxley was widely recognized to be one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time and respected as an important researcher into visual communication and sight-related theories as well.^[3]

Early life[link]

Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, UK, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevelyan (1891–1914), who committed suicide after a period of clinical depression.^[4]

Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside. His teacher was his mother, who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908 when he was 14. In 1911, he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three years".^[5] Aldous' near-blindness disqualified him from service in the First World War. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1916 he edited Oxford Poetry and later graduated (B.A.) with first class honours. His brother Julian wrote,

I believe his blindness was a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a career ... His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to take all knowledge for his province.^[6]

Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later to become George Orwell) and Stephen Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words.^[7] For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry.

Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant in Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel Brave New World (1932) states that this experience of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was one source for the novel.^[8]

Career[link]

Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early 20s. His first published novels were social satires, beginning with Crome Yellow (1921).

Bloomsbury set[link]

Left to right: Bloomsbury Group members – Lady Ottoline Morrell, Maria Nys, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell.

During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. In 1919 he married Maria Nys, a Belgian woman he met at Garsington; they had one son. The family lived in Italy part of the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1933).

Works of this period included important novels on the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, most famously Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example, Eyeless in Gaza). In Brave New World Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in Eyeless in Gaza.

Starting from this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including Ends and Means, An Encyclopedia of Pacifism, and Pacifism and Philosophy, and was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.^[9]

The U.S.[link]

In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, until his death, but also for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote Ends and Means (published in 1937). In this work he examines the fact that although most people in modern civilisation agree that they want a world of "liberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love", they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it.

Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. Huxley's book affirmed a sensibility that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities.

Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College. He spent much time at the college, which is in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel After Many a Summer (1939). The novel won Huxley that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.^[10] Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.

During this period Huxley earned some Hollywood income as a writer. In March 1938, his friend Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who hired Huxley for Madame Curie which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor. (The film was eventually completed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and cast.) Huxley received screen credit for Pride and Prejudice (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including Jane Eyre (1944).

However, his experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he wrote a synopsis of Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only understand every third word".^[11] Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else. For Dick Huemer, during the 1940s, Huxley went to the first of a five meetings' session to elaborate the script of Alice in Wonderland but never came again.^[12] For author John Grant, although the movie's character the Caterpillar displays some characteristics familiar from Huxley's discussion of his experiments with hallucinogens, Huxley's contribution to the movie is nonexistent.^[13]

On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:

Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.^[14]

Post World War II[link]

After the Second World War, Huxley applied for United States citizenship. His application was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U.S. He claimed a philosophical, rather than a religious objection, and therefore was not exempt under the McCarran Act.^[15] He withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the country; and in 1959 he turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government. During the 1950s Huxley's interest in the field of psychical research grew keener, and his later works are strongly influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with psychedelic drugs.

In October 1930, the English occultist Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.^{[citation needed]} He was introduced to mescaline (the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953.^[16] Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire Alfred Matthew Hubbard who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis.^[17] On 24 December 1955, Huxley took his first dose of LSD. Indeed, Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment", famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying. His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in the book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake), and Heaven and Hell. Some of his writings on psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies.^[18] While living in Los Angeles, Huxley was a friend of Ray Bradbury. According to Sam Weller's biography of Bradbury, the latter was dissatisfied with Huxley, especially after Huxley encouraged Bradbury to take psychedelic drugs.

Association with Vedanta[link]

Beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed by Swami Prabhavananda. Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and other followers he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices.

In 1944 Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God",^[19] translated by Swami Prabhavanada and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by The Vedanta Society of Southern California.

From 1941 through 1960 Huxley contributed 48 articles to Vedanta and the West, published by the Society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John van Druten from 1951 through 1962.

Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on CD: Knowledge and Understanding and Who Are We from 1955.

After the publication of The Doors of Perception, Huxley and the Swami disagreed about the meaning and importance of the LSD drug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the Society's journal, lecture at the temple, and attend social functions.

Eyesight[link]

With respect to details about the true quality of Huxley's eyesight at specific points in his life, there are differing accounts. Around 1939, Huxley encountered the Bates Method for better eyesight, and a teacher, Margaret Corbett, who was able to teach him in the method. In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre (160,000 m²) ranchito in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California, in northernmost Los Angeles County. Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with the Bates Method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert. He reported that for the first time in over 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his successes with the Bates Method, The Art of Seeing, which was published in 1942 (US), 1943 (UK). It was from this period, with the publication of the generally disputed theories contained in the latter book, that a growing degree of popular controversy arose over the subject of Huxley’s eyesight.

It was, and to a noticeable extent still is, widely held that, for most of his life, since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, that his eyesight was exceedingly poor (despite the partial recovery which had enabled him to study at Oxford). For instance, some ten years after publication of The Art of Seeing, in 1952, Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty: "Then suddenly he faltered—and the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment."^[20]

On the other hand, Huxley's second wife, Laura Archera Huxley, would later emphasise in her biographical account, This Timeless Moment: "One of the great achievements of his life: that of having regained his sight." Here, she portrays the accomplishment as both metaphorical and considerably physiological in nature, attributing that which she cites J. Krishnamurti as naming the spirit of "freedom from the known", which she suggests that Huxley applied, non-exhaustively, in writing The Art of Seeing and utilising the Bates Method. After revealing a letter she wrote to the Los Angeles Times disclaiming the label of Huxley as a "poor fellow who can hardly see" by Walter C. Alvarez, she tempers this: "Although I feel it was an injustice to treat Aldous as though he were blind, it is true there were many indications of his impaired vision. For instance, although Aldous did not wear glasses, he would quite often use a magnifying lens."^[21] Laura Huxley proceeds to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency peculiar to Huxley's vision. Her account, in this respect, is discernibly congruent with the following sample of Huxley's own words from The Art of Seeing. "The most characteristic fact about the functioning of the total organism, or any part of the organism, is that it is not constant, but highly variable." Nevertheless, the topic of Huxley’s eyesight continues to endure similar, significant controversy, regardless of how trivial a subject matter it might initially appear.^[22]

Personal life[link]

He married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist.^[23] In 1955, Maria died of breast cancer.

In 1956 he married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author. She wrote This Timeless Moment, a biography of Huxley. In 1960 Huxley himself was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel Island,^[24] and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen Institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential Movement.

Death[link]

On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular". According to her account of his death^[25] in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am & a few hours later; he died aged 69, at 5:20 pm on 22 November 1963, several hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Huxley's ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village near Guildford, Surrey, England.^[26]

Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, as was the death of the British author C. S. Lewis, who also died on 22 November. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley. Huxley's literary legacy continues to be represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt.

Awards[link]

• 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
• 1959 Aldous Huxley American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for Brave New World.
• 1962 the Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.^[27]

Film adaptations of Huxley's work[link]

• 1968 Point Counter Point BBC mini-series by Simon Raven.
• 1971 The Devils (Ken Russell) adapted Huxley's The Devils of Loudun.
• 1998 US TV adaptation of Brave New World

Selected works[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Atkins, John. Aldous Huxley: A Literary Study, J. Calder, 1956
• Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Harper and Row, 1974, rev. ed., Ivan R. Dee, 2002 ISBN 1-56663-454-7
• Dunaway, David King. Huxley in Hollywood, HarperCollins 1990, ISBN 0-385-41591-5
• Huxley, Aldous. The Human Situation: Aldous Huxley Lectures at Santa Barbara 1959, Flamingo Modern Classic, 1994, ISBN 0-00-654732-7
• Huxley, Laura Archera. This Timeless Moment, Celestial Arts, 2001, ISBN 0-89087-968-9
• Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley: modern satirical novelist of ideas, Firchow and Nugel editors, LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2006, ISBN 3-8258-9668-3
• Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley, Macmillan, 2003, ISBN 0-312-30237-5
• Rolo, Charles J. (ed.). The World of Aldous Huxley, Grosset Universal Library, 1947.
• Sexton, James (ed.). Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters, Ivan R. Dee, 2007, ISBN 1-56663-629-2
• Sawyer, Dana. Aldous Huxley, Crossroad Publishing Co., 2002, ISBN 0-8245-1987-2
• Watt, Conrad (ed.). Aldous Huxley, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0-415-15915-9

External links[link]

Find more about Aldous Huxley on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Images and media from Commons
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource

Biography portal

• Raymond Fraser, George Wickes (Spring 1960). "Interview: Aldous Huxley: The Art of Fiction No. 24". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4698/the-art-of-fiction-no-24-aldous-huxley. 
• Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
• BBC discussion programme In our time: "Brave New World". Huxley and the novel. 9 April 2009. (Audio, 45 mins)
• BBC In their own words series. 12 October 1958. (Video, 12 mins).
• "The Ultimate Revolution" (talk at UC Berkeley, 20 March 1962)
• Huxley interviewed on The Mike Wallace interview 18 May 1958. (Video)
• Works by Aldous Huxley on Open Library at the Internet Archive
• Works by or about Aldous Huxley in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Aldous Huxley at Project Gutenberg
• Centre for Huxley Research

Salman Rushdie
Rushdie at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival Vanity Fair party
Born	Ahmed Salman Rushdie (1947-06-19) 19 June 1947 (age 65) Bombay, Bombay Presidency, British India (now Mumbai, Maharashtra, India)
Occupation	writer
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	Indian[1]
Alma mater	King's College, Cambridge
Genres	Magic realism Satire Postcolonialism
Subjects	Historical criticism Travel writing
Spouse(s)	Clarissa Luard (1976–1987) Marianne Wiggins (1988–1993) Elizabeth West (1997–2004) Padma Lakshmi (2004–2007)
Influences This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (December 2011) Günter Grass Gabriel García Márquez Italo Calvino Vladimir Nabokov James Joyce Jorge Luis Borges Thomas Pynchon Mikhail Bulgakov Franz Kafka Saul Bellow Christopher Hitchens
Influenced This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (December 2011) Zadie Smith Homi K. Bhabha Taslima Nasrin Christopher Hitchens

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (Hindi: अहमद सलमान रुशदी (Devanagari), احمد سلمان رشدی (Nastaʿlīq);  /sælˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/;^[2] 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 East and West.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. 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 dans Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999.^[3] In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Knight Bachelor for his services to literature.^[4] In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.^[5]

Since 2000, Rushdie has "lived mostly near Union Square" in New York City.^[6] In 2007 he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives.^[7] In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[8]

His latest novel is Luka and the Fire of Life, published in November 2010. Earlier the same year, he announced that he was writing his memoirs.^[9]

Early life and family background[link]

The only son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a University of Cambridge-educated lawyer turned businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher, Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, into a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent.^[10][11][12] He was educated at Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, Rugby School, and King's College, University of Cambridge, where he studied history.

Career[link]

Copywriter[link]

Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working 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, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer.^[13][14][15] John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty has criticised Rushdie for not referring to his copywriting past frequently enough, although conceding: "He did write crap ads ... admittedly."^[16]

Major literary work[link]

His first novel, Grimus, a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability. It significantly shaped the course that Indian writing in English followed over the next decade, and is regarded by many as one of the great books of the last 100 years.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[17] 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.^[18]

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 Indian diaspora.

Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in the 1980s, The Jaguar Smile (1987). The book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments.

His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see section below). Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He also wrote "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" in 1990.

Salman Rushdie presenting his book Shalimar the Clown

Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.^[19]

In his 2002 non-fiction collection Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter and praised her highly in the foreword for her collection Burning your Boats.

In 2012, Salman Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack--a company that synchronises ebooks with customised soundtracks to create an immersive reading experience—when he published his short story In the South on the platform.^[20]

Other activities[link]

Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general.^[21] He 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.^[22] Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006.

He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers, published by Penguin in November 2005.

Salman Rushdie having a discussion with Emory University students

In 2006, Rushdie joined the Emory University faculty as Distinguished Writer in Residence for a five-year term.^[23] Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances).

Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On 12 May 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation (Hunt's directorial debut) of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me. In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO program "Real Time With Bill Maher".

Rushdie is currently collaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film will be called Midnight's Children.^[24][25] While casting is still in progress, Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das,^[26] and Irrfan Khan are confirmed as participating in the film.^[27] Mehta has stated that production will begin in September, 2010.^[28]

Rushdie announced in June 2011 that he had written the first draft of a script for a new television series for the U.S. cable network Showtime, a project on which he will also serve as an executive producer. The new series, to be called The Next People, will be, according to Rushie, "a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people." The idea of a television series was suggested by his U.S. agents, said Rushdie, who felt that television would allow him more creative control than feature film. The Next People is being made by the British film production company Working Title, the firm behind such projects as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shaun of the Dead.^[29]

Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund,^[30] a non-profit organisation which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America,^[31] an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.^[32]

He took on Facebook over the use of his name in 2011. He won. Rushdie had asked to use his middle name Salman, which he is most recognised by. He described his online identity crisis in a series of messages posted on Twitter, among them ""Dear #Facebook, forcing me to change my FB name from Salman to Ahmed Rushdie is like forcing J. Edgar to become John Hoover" and "Or, if F. Scott Fitzgerald was on #Facebook, would they force him to be Francis Fitzgerald? What about F. Murray Abraham?" Messages such as these were then circulated online. Facebook eventually relented and allowed him to use the name by which he is universally known.^[33][34]

[edit] The Satanic Verses and the fatwā

The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (sura) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gibreel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities. (12 total: India, Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore, Venezuela and Pakistan)

On 14 February 1989, a fatwā requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam" (chapter IV of the book depicts the character of an Imam in exile who returns to incite revolt from the people of his country with no regard for their safety). A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years. On 7 March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.

The publication of the book and the fatwā sparked violence around the world, with bookstores firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies, burning copies of the book. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked, seriously injured, and even killed.^{[note 1]} Many more people died in riots in some countries. Despite the danger posed by the fatwā, Rushdie made a public appearance at London's Wembley Stadium on 11 August 1993 during a concert by U2. In 2010, U2 bassist Adam Clayton recalled that "[lead vocalist] Bono had been calling Salman Rushdie from the stage every night on the Zoo TV tour. When we played Wembley, Salman showed up in person and the stadium erupted. You [could] tell from [drummer] Larry Mullen, Jr.'s face that we weren't expecting it. Salman was a regular visitor after that. He had a backstage pass and he used it as often as possible. For a man who was supposed to be in hiding, it was remarkably easy to see him around the place."^[35]

On 24 September 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government, then headed by Mohammad Khatami, gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie."^[36][37]

Hardliners in Iran have continued to reaffirm the death sentence.^[38] In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwā was reaffirmed by Iran's current spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.^[39] Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards have declared that the death sentence on him is still valid.^[40] Iran has rejected requests to withdraw the fatwā on the basis that only the person who issued it may withdraw it,^[39] and the person who issued it – Ayatollah Khomeini – has been dead since 1989.

Rushdie has reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on 14 February letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He said, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat."^[41] Despite the threats on Rushdie, he has publicly said that his family has never been threatened and that his mother (who lived in Pakistan during the later years of her life) even received outpourings of support.^[42]

A former bodyguard to Rushdie, Ron Evans, planned to publish a book recounting the behaviour of the author during the time he was in hiding. Evans claimed that Rushdie tried to profit financially from the fatwa and was suicidal, but Rushdie dismissed the book as a "bunch of lies" and took legal action against Ron Evans, his co-author and their publisher.^[43] On 26 August 2008 Rushdie received an apology at the High Court in London from all three parties.^[44] A memoir of his years of hiding, Joseph Anton, is due to be published 18 September 2012. Joseph Anton was Rushdie's secret alias.^[45]

Failed assassination attempt and Hezbollah's comments[link]

On 3 August 1989, while Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh was priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosives in a hotel in Paddington, Central London, the bomb exploded prematurely, destroying two floors of the hotel and killing Mazeh. A previously unknown Lebanese group, the Organization of the Mujahidin of Islam, said he died preparing an attack "on the apostate Rushdie". There is a shrine in Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery for Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh that says he was "Martyred in London, 3 August 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie." Mazeh's mother was invited to relocate to Iran, and the Islamic World Movement of Martyrs' Commemoration built his shrine in the cemetery that holds thousands of Iranian soldiers slain in the Iran–Iraq War.^[36] During the 2006 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that "If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's fatwā against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so. I am sure there are millions of Muslims who are ready to give their lives to defend our prophet's honour and we have to be ready to do anything for that."^[46] James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation testified before the United States Congress that a "March 1989" [sic] explosion in Britain was a Hezbollah attempt to assassinate Rushdie that failed when a bomb exploded prematurely, killing a Hezbollah activist in London.^[47]

[edit] International Guerillas

In 1990, soon after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a Pakistani film entitled International Gorillay (International Guerillas) was released that depicted Rushdie as plotting to cause the downfall of Pakistan by opening a chain of casinos and discos in the country. The film was popular with Pakistani audiences, and it "presents Rushdie as a Rambo-like figure pursued by four Pakistani guerrillas".^[48] The British Board of Film Classification refused to allow it a certificate, as "it was felt that the portrayal of Rushdie might qualify as criminal libel, causing a breach of the peace as opposed to merely tarnishing his reputation."^[49] This effectively prevented the release of the film in Britain. Two months later, however, Rushdie himself wrote to the board, saying that while he thought the film "a distorted, incompetent piece of trash", he would not sue if it were released.^[49] He later said, "If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town: everyone would have seen it".^[49] While the film was a great hit in Pakistan, it went virtually unnoticed in the West.^[49]

2012 Jaipur Literature Festival events[link]

Rushdie was due to appear at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012.^[50] However, he later cancelled, and indeed cancelled his complete tour of India citing a possible threat to his life as the primary reason.^[51][52] He investigated police reports that paid assassins had been hired to kill him and suggested the police might be lying.^[53]

Meanwhile, the police, on the advice of officials, sought Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar. They fled from Jaipur after reading excerpts from The Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literature Festival. In India the import of the book is banned via customs. However, reading from an existing copy of the book is not illegal.^[54]

A proposed video link session between Rushdie and the Jaipur Literature Festival was cancelled at the last minute^[55] after the government pressured the festival to stop it.^[53] Rushdie returned to India to address a conference in Delhi on 16 March 2012.^[56]

Knighthood[link]

Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on 16 June 2007. He remarked, "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way."^[57] In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Parliamentarians of several of these countries condemned the action, and Iran and Pakistan called in their British envoys to protest formally. Controversial condemnation issued by Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq was in turn rebuffed by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Ironically, their respective fathers Zia-ul-Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been earlier portrayed in Rushdie's novel Shame. Mass demonstrations against Rushdie's knighthood took place in Pakistan and Malaysia. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Rushdie.^[58]

Al-Qaeda has condemned the Rushdie honour. The Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying in an audio recording that Britain's award for Indian-born Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response."^[59]

Religious and political beliefs[link]

Rushdie came from a Muslim family but says that he was never really religious. In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending".^[60]

His books often focus on the role of religion in society and conflicts between faiths and between the religious and those of no faith.

Rushdie advocates the application of higher criticism, pioneered during the late 19th century. Rushdie called for a reform in Islam^[61] in a guest opinion piece printed in The Washington Post and The Times in mid-August 2005:

What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air. (...) It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it. (...) Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

Rushdie supported the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, leading the leftist Tariq Ali to label Rushdie and other "warrior writers" as "the belligerati'".^[62] He was supportive of the US-led campaign to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, but was a vocal critic of the 2003 war in Iraq. He has stated that while there was a "case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussein", US unilateral military intervention was unjustifiable.^[63]

Paul Auster and Rushdie greeting Israeli President Shimon Peres with Caro Llewelyn in 2008.

In the wake of the 'Danish Cartoons Affair' in March 2006—which many considered an echo of the death threats and fatwā that followed publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989^[64]—Rushdie signed the manifesto 'Together Facing the New Totalitarianism', a statement warning of the dangers of religious extremism. The Manifesto was published in the left-leaning French weekly Charlie Hebdo in March 2006.

In 2006, Rushdie stated that he supported comments by the then-Leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw, who criticised the wearing of the niqab (a veil that covers all of the face except the eyes). Rushdie stated that his three sisters would never wear the veil. He said, "I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm completely on Straw's side."^[65]

The Marxist Catholic critic Terry Eagleton, a former admirer of Rushdie's work, attacked him for his positions, saying he "cheered on the Pentagon's criminal ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan".^[66] However, Eagleton subsequently apologised for having misrepresented Rushdie's views.

At an appearance at 92nd Street Y, Rushdie expressed his view on copyright when answering a question whether he had considered copyright law a barrier (or impediment) to free speech.

No. But that's because I write for a living, [laughs] and I have no other source of income, and I naïvely believe that stuff that I create belongs to me, and that if you want it you might have to give me some cash. [...] My view is I do this for a living. The thing wouldn't exist if I didn't make it and so it belongs to me and don't steal it. You know. It's my stuff.^[67]

When Amnesty International (AI) suspended human rights activist Gita Sahgal for saying to the press that she thought AI should distance itself from Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Rushdie said:

Amnesty ... has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty's leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong. It has greatly compounded its error by suspending the redoubtable Gita Sahgal for the crime of going public with her concerns. Gita Sahgal is a woman of immense integrity and distinction.... It is people like Gita Sahgal who are the true voices of the human rights movement; Amnesty and Begg have revealed, by their statements and actions, that they deserve our contempt.^[68]

Personal life[link]

Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1980). His 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 Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1999). In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and model Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on 2 July 2007, with Lakshmi indicating that it was her desire to end the marriage. In 2008 the Bollywood press romantically linked him to the Indian model Riya Sen, with whom he was otherwise a friend.^[69] In response to the media speculation about their friendship, she simply stated "I think when you are Salman Rushdie, you must get bored with people who always want to talk to you about literature."^[70]

In 1999 Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a tendon condition that causes drooping eyelids and that, according to him, was making 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.^[71]

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

• 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)

Collections[link]

• Homeless by Choice (1992, with R. Jhabvala and V. S. Naipaul)
• East, West (1994)
• The Best American Short Stories (2008, as Guest Editor)

Children's books[link]

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

Essays and non-fiction[link]

• The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
• "In Good Faith", Granta, 1990
• Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1992)
• "The Wizard of Oz: BFI Film Classics", BFI, 1992.
• "Mohandas Gandhi." Time, 13 April 1998.
• "Imagine There Is No Heaven." , extracted contribution from Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen, a UN sponsored publication in English by Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam. The Guardian, 16 October 1999.
• Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002)
• "A fine pickle." The Guardian, 28 February 2009.
• "In the South." Booktrack, 7 February 2012

Awards[link]

• Aristeion Prize (European Union)
• Arts Council Writers' Award
• Author of the Year (British Book Awards)
• Author of the Year (Germany)
• Booker Prize for Fiction
• Booker of Bookers for the best novel among the Booker Prize winners for Fiction awarded at its 25th anniversary (in 1993)
• The Best of the Booker awarded to commemorate the Booker Prize's 40th anniversary (in 2008), winner by public vote
• Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
• English-Speaking Union Award
• Honorary Patron, University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin.
• Hutch Crossword Book Award (India)
• India Abroad Lifetime Achievement Award (USA)
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Fiction)
• Kurt Tucholsky Prize (Sweden)
• Mantua Prize (Italy)
• James Joyce Award – University College Dublin
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology Honorary Professorship
• Chapman University Honorary Doctorate – Doctor of Humane Letters
• Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Cultural Humanism (Harvard University)
• Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy)
• Prix Colette (Switzerland)
• Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
• St. Louis Literary Award – Saint Louis University
• State Prize for Literature (Austria)
• Whitbread Novel Award (twice)
• Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Children's Fiction
• University of Liège Doctor honoris causa

See also[link]

• Blitcon, British literary conservatives
• Censorship in South Asia
• International PEN
• List of fatwas
• The Butterfly Hunter
• The Satanic Verses controversy

Notes[link]

1. ^ See Hitoshi Igarashi, Ettore Capriolo, William Nygaard

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Salman Rushdie

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Salman Rushdie

• Salman Rushdie official website
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • In Depth interview with Rushdie, 5 December 2010
• Salman Rushdie on Charlie Rose
• Salman Rushdie at the Internet Movie Database
• Article archive at Journalisted
• Works by or about Salman Rushdie in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Salman Rushdie collected news and commentary at Al Jazeera English
• Salman Rushdie collected news and commentary at Dawn
• Salman Rushdie collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Salman Rushdie collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Contemporary writers: Salman Rushdie. British Council: Arts
• Jack Livings (Summer 2005). "Salman Rushdie, The Art of Fiction No. 186". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5531/the-art-of-fiction-no-186-salman-rushdie. 
• New York Times special feature on Rushdie, 1999
• Critical Studies on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children Indian Literature: A Critical Casebook

v t e Works by Salman Rushdie 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) Story collections: East, West (1994) Non-fiction: The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1992) Homeless by Choice (1992) Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002) Plays: Haroun and the Sea of Stories (with Tim Supple and David Tushingham) Midnight's Children (with Tim Supple and Simon Reade) Children's books: Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) Anthology: The Vintage Book of Indian Writing (co-editor)