Midnight's Children made him; Verses nearly killed him
Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker winner was twice named the prize's best ever—yet The Satanic Verses (1988) brought a fatwa, global bans, and, in 2022, a stabbing that cost him an eye. Between those poles he remade the migrant novel.
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born 19 June 1947 in Bombay to a Kashmiri Muslim family; his father Anis adopted the surname for Ibn Rushd. Cathedral School, Rugby, and a 1968 Cambridge history degree at King's College preceded copywriting at Ogilvy & Mather—"irresistibubble," "Naughty but Nice," American Express's "That'll do nicely"—while he drafted Midnight's Children. Grimus (1975) sank; Midnight's Children (1981) followed Saleem Sinai, born at India's independence midnight with uncanny ties to other midnight children, and won the Booker, later the Best of the Bookers (1993) and Booker of Bookers (2008). Rushdie denied writing autobiography into characters, citing debts to Indian oral narrative, Austen, and Dickens.
Shame (1983) mapped Pakistan's turmoil onto figures resembling Bhutto and Zia, winning France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. The Jaguar Smile (1987) reported Sandinista Nicaragua. The Satanic Verses (1988) won the Whitbread yet was read by some as irreverent toward Muhammad; Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for Rushdie's death, the book was banned in twenty countries, and extremists citing it committed killings and bombings. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) answered with an allegory of storytelling against silence. Later fiction spans East, West (1994), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995 Whitbread), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)—which gave U2 a Rushdie lyric—and Shalimar the Clown (2005).
He was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, named Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1999, knighted in 2007, and ranked thirteenth among The Times's fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Living in the United States since 2000, he taught at Emory and became NYU's Distinguished Writer in Residence in 2015; Joseph Anton (2012) memoirized the fatwa years. In 2022 he survived a stabbing at Chautauqua that cost his right eye and damaged liver and hands; two rescuers later received Carnegie Medals. Time named him among the world's 100 most influential people in April 2023—proof that the migrant, myth-laden novel can still remake both literature and the risks of publishing it.
Source: Salman Rushdie
