Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is a British-American novelist and essayist whose work has shaped the landscape of contemporary world literature. Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1947, he was educated at Cathedral School in Bombay, Rugby School in England, and King's College, Cambridge, where he read History. He became one of the most celebrated and controversial writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later judged the Best of the Booker and the Booker of Bookers. The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, led to a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini calling for his death, forcing Rushdie into hiding for nearly a decade. He has published numerous novels since, including The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Victory City, as well as essay collections and short fiction including East, West. In 2022, Rushdie was attacked and seriously injured at a public event in New York, an assault that cost him the sight in one eye. He wrote about the experience in Knife. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers fiction of extraordinary imagination, linguistic inventiveness, and moral courage.