Salman Rushdie: The Writer Who Fought for Freedom of Speech
Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie postcolonial and postmodern Anglo-Indian novelist is known for his use of mythology, fantasy, religious and traditional materials in a series of works with links to magical realism.
Salman Rushdie: The Man Who Provoked the Ayatollah
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on June 19, 1947. He went to school in Bombay (now Mumbai) and at Rugby in England, and read History at King’s College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlight theatre company.
In the wake of graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964 and worked quickly on TV before coming back to England, starting work as a publicist for an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus was published in 1975.
His second novel, the acclaimed, Midnight’s Children was distributed in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers’ Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993, was, made a decision to have been the Booker of Bookers, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the honor’s 25-year history.
The novel narrates key events in the history of India through the story of pickle-factory worker Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born as India won independence from Britain in 1947.
The pundit, Malcolm Bradbury acclaimed the novel’s accomplishment in The Modern British Novel (Penguin, 1994): ‘another begins for the late-twentieth-century novel.’
Rushdie’s third novel, Shame (1983), which numerous commentators saw as a moral story of the political circumstance in Pakistan, won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
The publication in 1988 of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to accusations of blasphemy against Islam and demonstrations by the Islamist groups in India and Pakistan.
The universal Iranian initiative issued a fatwa against Rushdie on February 14, 1989 – viably a sentence of death, and he was constrained into stowing away under the assurance of the British government and police.
The book itself fixates on the undertakings of two Indian performing artists, Gibreel and Saladin, who tumble to earth in Britain when their Air India fly detonates. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988.
Salman Rushdie kept on composing and distribute books, including a youngsters’ book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a notice about the perils of narrating that won the Writers’ Guild Award (Best Children’s Book), and which he adjusted for the phase with Tim Supple and David Tushingham.
There pursued a book of expositions entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981 (1991); East, West (1994), a book of short stories; and a novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). The Ground Beneath Her Feet, distributed in 1999, re-works the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice with regards to present day well-known music.
His novel, Fury, set in New York toward the start of the third thousand years, was distributed in 2001. His travel narrative, The Jaguar Smile (1987), is an account of a visit to Nicaragua in 1986.
Salman Rushdie has been an honorary professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made the distinguished fellow in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1995.
Rushdie was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1993 and the Aristeion Literary Prize in 1996 and has received eight honorary doctorates.
He was elected to the Board of American PEN in 2002 The subjects in his new book Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002), range from popular culture and football to the twentieth-century literature and politics.
Salman Rushdie is likewise co-writer (with Tim Supple and Simon Reade) of the stage adjustment of Midnight’s Children, debuted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002.
His novel Shalimar: The Clown (2005) is the story of Max Ophuls, his killer and daughter, and a fourth character who links them all. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award. He was Knighted Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth in 2007. He holds the rank of Commander in Ordre des Arts et des Letters of France.
He began a five-year term as a distinguished writer in Residence at Emory University in 2007 and in 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novels include the Enchantress of Florence (2008), In the South (2009) and Luka and the Fire of Life (Nov. 2010).
Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. In 2012, he distributed Joseph Anton: A Memoir, a record of his life in the wake of the contention over The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie was expected to show up at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012. However, he later canceled it. Rushdie came back to India to address a conference in Delhi on 16 March 2012.
