Salman Rushdie

Born on June 19, 1947, in Bombay, India, to a prosperous Muslim businessman who had studied at Cambridge, Ahmed Salman Rushdie was sent to England at fourteen to attend Rugby School and later read history at King's College, Cambridge. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which told the story of Indian independence through a narrator born at the exact moment of partition, won the Booker Prize and was twice judged the best novel in the prize's history. The Satanic Verses (1988) provoked a global firestorm; on February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death. He spent nearly a decade in hiding under the protection of the British government, moving between safe houses under the alias Joseph Anton, a name drawn from Conrad and Chekhov. The fatwa did not prevent him from writing; he produced Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) while living underground. He emerged gradually into public life, settling in New York City and publishing a memoir, Joseph Anton (2012), about his years in hiding. On August 12, 2022, at a literary event at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, he was stabbed repeatedly onstage, losing sight in his right eye and sustaining nerve damage in his hand. He survived and published Knife (2024), a reckoning with the attack and its aftermath.

On St Valentine's Day 1989, Rushdie went to a London memorial service for his friend Bruce Chatwin. Earlier that day, Ayatollah Khomeini had called on the world's Muslims to kill him. From the pew behind, Paul Theroux leaned in and whispered, 'I suppose we'll be here for you next week, Salman.'