Sir
Ahmed Salman Rushdie (/sælˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/;[3] Kashmiri: अहमद सलमान रुशदी (Devanagari), احمد سلمان رشدی (
Nastaʿlīq); 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 centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries.
Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā calling for his assassination issued by
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the
Supreme Leader of Iran, on
14 February 1989, and as a result he was put under police protection by the
British government.
Rushdie was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of
France in
January 1999.[5] 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.
The son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a
University of Cambridge-educated lawyer turned businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher, Rushdie was born in
Bombay, then
British India, into a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent. Rushdie has three sisters. He wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of
Averroes (
Ibn Rushd). He was educated at
Cathedral and John Connon School in
Mumbai,
Rugby School in
Warwickshire, and
King's College,
University of Cambridge, where he read history.[4]
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.[11] It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer.[12][13][14]
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."[15]
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.[16] 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.[17] However, the author has 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."[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
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.
His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie
- published: 23 Apr 2015
- views: 544