Salman Rushdie

Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born into a wealthy Kashmiri-Muslim family in Bombay before India declared independence from British rule. His father was a skilled lawyer and businessman, and his mother was a teacher. Early in life, he was educated at a private school in Mumbai and later attended a British boarding school. Ultimately, Rushdie studied at King’s College, University of Cambridge, where he earned an M.A. in history. He began his career in London in the 1970s as a copywriter for numerous advertising agencies and published his first two books during this time, including Midnight’s Children. Following the success of Midnight’s Children—which subsequently won the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Best of the Bookers in 1993 and 2008—Rushdie began writing full-time and has since published several award-winning novels, essays, and short stories, including The Satanic Verses and East, West. In 1983, he was elected as a fellow to the Royal Society of Literature, the United Kingdom’s premier literary organization, earning him the credentials FRSL. Following the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses, a controversial novel concerning Islam and a controversial Muslim tradition, Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, or bounty, on Rushdie’s head for blasphemy. After Rushdie was forced to spend years in hiding, the former president of Iran declared the fatwa finished; however, the order was never officially lifted, and the bounty was recently increased in 2016 to over three million dollars. In 1999, Rushdie was awarded Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, the highest form of French recognition for contribution to the arts, and in June of 2007, he was knighted by the Queen of England for accomplishments in literature. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived exclusively in New York City, where he was named the Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in 2015. He entered into four marriages, each ending in divorce, and has two sons, Zafar, born in 1979, and Milan, born in 1997.