Salman Rushdie

Sir Salman Rushdie , 1947-, British novelist, b. Bombay (now Mumbai, India). He is known for the allusive richness of his language and the wide variety of Eastern and Western characters and cultures he explores. His first novels, including Midnight's Children (1981; Booker Prize; adapted for the stage by Rushdie, 2003) and Shame (1983), incorporate the technique of magic realism ; elements of this approach can also be found in his later fiction. Parts of his allegorical novel The Satanic Verses (1988) were deemed sacrilegious and enraged many Muslims, including Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini , who in 1989 issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death. Violence occurred in some cities where the book was sold, and Rushdie went into hiding. From his seclusion he wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a novelistic allegory against censorship; East, West (1995), a book of short stories; and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), a novel that examines India's recent history through the life of a Jewish-Christian family. The Iranian government ended its support for the fatwa in 1998, but in 2004 an Iranian group offered a bounty for Rushdie's murder. Rushdie's first post- fatwa novel, The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), mingles myth and reality in a surreal world of rock-and-roll celebrity. Since then he has also written the novels Fury (2001), Shalimar the Clown (2005), and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), a romantic fantasy of 16th-century East and West, chiefly tales of Mughal India and Renaissance Italy. In addition, his work includes numerous essays, many of them included in Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 (2002). Rushdie was knighted in 2008, provoking condemnation from some Muslims.

Bibliography: See Conversations with Salman Rushdie (2000), ed. by M. Reder, Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas (2001), ed. by P. S. Chauhan; studies by T. Brennan (1989), J. Harrison (1992), C. Cundy (1996), M. K. Booker, ed. (1999), R. Y. Clark (2001), H. Bloom, ed. (2003), P. Chowdhury (2007), and S. Morton (2008).

Rushdie, (Ahmed) Salman (1947– ), novelist and short- story writer, born in Bombay to a Muslim family, educated at King's College, Cambridge. Rushdie's bicultural upbringing informs all his work. He draws on the allegorical, fable-making traditions of both East and West and is often classed among the exponents of magic realism. His first novel, Grimus (1975), was followed by Midnight's Children (1981, Booker Prize), the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on the day that India was granted independence, and whose life becomes emblematic of the political and social destiny of the new nation. In Shame (1983) the subject is Pakistan and the culture of shame and honour that oppresses women. The Satanic Verses (1988) is a jet-propelled panoramic novel which questions illusion, reality, and the power of faith. Certain passages were interpreted by some Muslims as blasphemous and brought upon Rushdie the notorious death sentence or fatwa, invoked by the Ayatollah Khomeni in February 1989, which obliged him to seek police protection. After Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990, a novel for children), came East, West (1994, short stories), again written on the cultural cusp between two imaginative traditions, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), an exuberant study of cultural and personal inheritance, The Ground Beneath her Feet (1999), and Fury (2001).