Salman Rushdie facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sir
Salman Rushdie
CH FRSL
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Rushdie in 2024
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| Born | Ahmed Salman Rushdie 19 June 1947 Bombay, British India |
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| Education | King's College, Cambridge (BA) |
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Clarissa Luard
(m. 1976; div. 1987)Elizabeth West
(m. 1997; div. 2004) |
| Children | 2 |
| Relatives | Natalie Rushdie (daughter-in-law) |
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Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie CH FRSL (/sʌlˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/; born 19 June 1947) 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.
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 April 2023. Throughout his life, Rushdie has had five marriages, four of which ended in divorce.
Early life and education
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 Joseph Anton that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes (Ibn Rushd). He recalls his "first literary influence": "When I first saw the 'The Wizard of Oz' it made a writer of me." He recalls "Every child in India in my day (and probably still) was obsessed with P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I read mountains of books by both." He recalls that "Alice captured my imagination as few other books did: both the books, not just Alice's Adventures in Wonderland but Through the Looking-Glass as well, and I can still recite the whole of "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from memory. I also loved the Swallows And Amazons series by Arthur Ransome because of the unimaginable freedom those young people sailing in the Lake District were given by their families...When I was 16, I read The Lord Of The Rings and became obsessed, and can still recite the inscription on the Ruling Ring ('One ring to rule them all...') in the dark language of Mordor. I read an astonishing amount of Golden Age science fiction, not just Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut but more arcane writers like Clifford D. Simak, James Blish, Zenna Henderson and L. Sprague de Camp."
Rushdie grew up in Bombay and was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort in South Bombay, before moving to England in 1964 to attend Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire. He then attended King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.
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. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter's, calling her "the first great writer I ever met".
Literary works
Early works and literary breakthrough, 1975–1987
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.
The Satanic Verses and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1988–1990
His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see section below). It was followed by Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990. Written in the shadow of a fatwa, it is about the dangers of story-telling and an allegorical defence of the power of stories over silence.
Further works, 1990s–2000s
In addition to novels, 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) is a remaking of the myth of Orpheus that 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.
Following the novel Fury, set mainly in New York and avoiding the previous sprawling narrative style that spans generations, periods and places, Rushdie's 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown, a story about love and betrayal set in Kashmir and Los Angeles, was hailed as a return to form by a number of critics.
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 Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Lewis Carroll, Günter Grass and James Joyce. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter's and praised her highly in the foreword of her collection Burning your Boats.
2008 saw the publication of The Enchantress of Florence, one of Rushdie's most challenging works that focuses on the past. It tells the story of a European's visit to Akbar's court, and his revelation that he is a lost relative of the Mughal emperor. The novel was praised in a review in The Guardian as a "sumptuous mixture of history with fable".
His novel Luka and the Fire of Life, a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, was published in November 2010 to critical acclaim. Earlier that year, he announced that he was writing his memoirs, entitled Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which was published in September 2012.
In 2012, Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack (a company that synchronises ebooks with customised soundtracks), when he published his short story "In the South" on the platform.
Later works, novels, and essays, 2015–2024
2015 saw the publication of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, a modern take on the One Thousand and One Nights. Based on the conflict of scholar Ibn Rushd (from whom Rushdie's family name derives), Rushdie explores themes of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism by depicting a war of the universe with a supernatural world of jinns. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: "Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible delight that it comes as a shock to remember that, like her, he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril. Scheherazade told her 1,001 tales to put off a stupid, cruel threat of death; Rushdie found himself under similar threat for telling an unwelcome tale. So far, like her, he has succeeded in escaping. May he continue to do so."
In 2017, The Golden House, a satirical novel set in contemporary America, was published. 2019 saw the publication of Quichotte, a modern retelling of 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 was Rushdie's first released work since he was attacked and injured in 2022. In April 2024, his autobiographical book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was published.
Academic and other activities
Rushdie has 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. 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.
Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival. 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. In May 2008, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2014, he taught a seminar on British Literature and served as the 2015 keynote speaker In September 2015, he joined the New York University Journalism Faculty as a Distinguished Writer in Residence.
Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation that provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C., and a patron of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He is a laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. 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 200th anniversary of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Film and television
Though he enjoys writing, Rushdie says he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. From early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood films (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-gynaecologist 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 programme Real Time with Bill Maher. Rushdie has said that he was approached for a cameo in Talladega Nights: "They had this idea, just one shot in which three very, very unlikely people were seen as NASCAR drivers. And I think they approached Julian Schnabel, Lou Reed, and me. We were all supposed to be wearing the uniforms and the helmet, walking in slow motion with the heat haze." In the end, their schedules did not allow for it.
Rushdie collaborated on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film was also called Midnight's Children. Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, and Irrfan Khan participated in the film. Production began in September 2010; the film was released in 2012.
Rushdie announced in June 2011 that he had written the first draft of a script for a new television series for the US 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 Rushdie, "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 US 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 projects including Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shaun of the Dead.
In 2017, Rushdie appeared as himself in episode 3 of season 9 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, sharing scenes with Larry David to offer advice on how Larry should deal with the fatwa that has been ordered against him.
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
Knighthood
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." 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.
Rushdie was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
Personal life
Rushdie has been married five times and has two children; his first four marriages ended in divorce. 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 Coyle. He left Clarissa Luard in the mid-1980s for the Australian writer Robyn Davidson, to whom he was introduced by their mutual 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. He said: "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."
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. He has been a holder of the Person of Indian Origin Card, which grants certain rights to people of the Indian diaspora short of full citizenship.
See also
In Spanish: Salman Rushdie para niños
- Blasphemy
- The Butterfly Hunter
- Criticism of Islam
- Censorship in South Asia
- Hysterical realism
- Indians in the New York City metropolitan area
- List of fatwas
- List of Indian writers
- PEN International
- Postmodern literature
