Salman Rushdie

Ahmed Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in June 1947. He arrived in Britain to attend Rugby School in 1961 and in 1965 went to King’s College, Cambridge to study history. During his studies he developed an interest in the early history of Islam. While at Cambridge, he met E. M. Forster, was drawn to art house cinema and also joined the famous comedy troupe the Cambridge Footlights.

After a short period in Pakistan, where his family had moved from Bombay in 1964, Rushdie settled in Britain permanently in 1968, initially to carve out a career in theatre, briefly working with Oval House productions. In 1969 he started working as an advertising copywriter for agencies including Sharp McManus, Ogilvy and Mather and Ayer Barker Hegermann. Most famously he created the tagline for cream cakes, ‘naughty. But nice’ and the campaign for Aero chocolate bar with the suffix '-bubble'.

He published his first novel, Grimus in 1975. During the late 1970s and early 1980s Rushdie volunteered for the Camden Committee for Community Relations. Initially as member of the Executive Committee and subsequently as Chairman of Community Work, he supported South Asian families and called out the poor housing conditions in the borough.

Rushdie's breakthrough came with the 1981 publication of Midnight’s Children. Widely acclaimed, the book won the Booker Prize, Booker of Bookers and Best of the Booker. He followed the novel with Shame (1983) and a non-fiction travelogue, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987). He wrote and narrated the documentary 'The Riddle of Midnight', commissioned by Farrukh Dhondy for Channel Four.

In 1988 he published The Satanic Verses. Following an interview in India Today, protests against the book sprang up in India, Pakistan and Britain, culminating in the issuing of a fatwa by the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, on 14 February 1989, sentencing the writer, his publishers and translators to death. Rushdie went into hiding for over a decade. The ‘Satanic Verses’ or ‘Rushdie’ affair led to the book being banned in several countries. It sparked many debates around freedom of expression and led to the formation of several campaigning groups, including Women Against Fundamentalism.

In 1991, Rushdie published the essay collection Imaginary Homelands, in which he brought together a wide range of commentary on British culture, including the seminal essays ‘Outside the Whale’ and ‘The New Empire within Britain’, which consider post-imperial nostalgia in Britain and racism and discrimination. During the 1990s, while in hiding, he published The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991), which in a play adaptation premiered at the National Theatre in London in 1998, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1995).

Rushdie moved to New York in 2000. In his memoir, Joseph Anton (2012), he writes about his experience in hiding during the years of the fatwa. In 2022 Rushdie suffered life-altering injuries after a knife attack during a public event at Chautaqua, New York State, which he examines in his 2024 memoir, Knife.