- Born
- Birth nameAhmed Salman Rushdie
- Height5′ 7″ (1.70 m)
- He married the actress Padma Lakshmi, the hostess of "Padma's Passport," and dedicatee of his eighth novel, "Fury" (2001), on 17th April 2004. The late Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him for the novel "The Satanic Verses" on 14th February 1989. He is currently completing a ninth novel. Prior to becoming a full time novelist, he enjoyed a successful advertising career as a copywriter with Ayer Barker in London until 1982.- IMDb Mini Biography By: mirok
- His father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, belonged to the city's educated middle class and was a successful businessman. Rushdie grew up in wealthy circumstances in Bombay and was sent to English rugby at the age of 14, where he received a good education. In 1964, Rushdie, who exchanged his native Indian language for English, became a British citizen. After school, Rushdie studied history at Cambridge College. He then began working in journalism, theater and advertising until 1980.
In 1976, Rushdie married Clarissa Luard, with whom he had a son and remained together until 1987. From the beginning of the 1970s, Rushdie also became active as a writer. In 1975 he published his first novel, "Grimus". However, he achieved his first international success, especially on the Anglo-Saxon literary market, with the book "Midnight's Children", which tells the fate of a family in India's transition to independence and was also published in a German translation ("Mitternachtskinder") in 1981. Rushdie's style was based on allegorical stories that had political and historical contexts as a background, but were enriched with fantastic elements from the world of fairy tales.
In this way he provoked the Western literary scene with his third novel "Shame", which was published in German in 1983 ("Scham und Scham"). Although the publication of his novel "The Satanic Verses" in 1988 marked another success for the author, the work was not without controversy. In particular, the satirical depiction of the life of the Prophet Mohammed contained therein was seen by Muslim readers as a violation of their religious self-image. The Islamic protest against the book that then began reached its climax in February 1989: Iranian head of state Khomeini sentenced the provocative writer to death and called on Muslims all over the world to carry out the sentence.
The implementation of the "Fatwa", Khomeini's exclusion ruling, should be accelerated by a bounty worth millions. Despite Rushdie's apology to the Muslim community, Iran continued to uphold the fatwa even after Khomeini's death in June 1989; In 1991, the bounty against Rushdie was even doubled. The persistent death threat forced the writer to live under police protection and in constantly changing, secret places of residence. In 1988, Rushdie's second marriage was to the American writer Marianne Wiggins, who shared his exile with him until they separated in 1993.
Despite numerous threats against the publishers and, in some cases, successful assassination attempts against the translators of the book, "The Satanic Verses" enjoyed enormous distribution throughout the world. At the beginning of the 1990s, Rushdie broke out of his previous isolated exile through a lot of travel. During visits to Europe, Canada and the USA, he advocated for the right to freedom of expression in meetings with the respective heads of government. From the mid-1990s onwards, the Iranian government began to give in to the international protests against the fatwa, with those in power in Tehran increasingly distancing themselves from them.
In contrast, fundamentalist Islamist circles continued to adhere to the death sentence. In 1998, at a UN meeting, the Iranian president described the Rushdie case as closed. In an official statement, the Tehran government distanced itself from the fatwa imposed against Rushdie, which, however, according to religious-Islamic opinion, cannot be lifted. The novel "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," published in 1999, is about the power of love and music. In this work the author follows the mythical story of Orpheus and Euridice in a modern twist.
Salman Rushdie published his novel "Fury" in 2001, which is about New York. Since then, Rushdie has led a more liberated, if still not "normal" life, which is overshadowed by the continued death threat from fundamentalist circles. Salman Rushdie married Elizabeth West for the third time in 1997, with whom he has one child. However, the marriage did not last long. In April 2004, Rushdie married model Padma Lakshmi. The marriage ended in divorce in 2007. In the same year he worked as a so-called "Writer in Residence" at the American Emory University for 5 years.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth
- SpousesRachel Eliza Griffiths(2021 - present)Padma Lakshmi(April 17, 2004 - 2007) (divorced)Elizabeth West(August 28, 1997 - 2004) (divorced, 1 child)Marianne Wiggins(January 28, 1988 - March 2, 1993) (divorced)Clarissa Luard(1976 - 1987) (divorced, 1 child)
- Sentenced to death in 1989 for his book "The Satanic Verses" by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed the book to be an insult to the Islamic religion. He has lived under police protection ever since. Since the Ayatollah's death, he has become a slightly more public person.
- Helped pick the phrase "naughty but nice" as an advertising slogan to sell cakes in 1970s Britain.
- He was awarded a Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 2007 Queen Elizabeth II's Birthday Honors List for his services to Literature.
- His book "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" was written for his son Zafar while he was in hiding, and they could not meet.
- According to the memoir "Joseph Anton", Keith Vaz MP promised Rushdie support over the phone, and then supported a protest against him.
- I still refuse to call it 'Mumbai', as do many people who live there. It's not ancient like Delhi, with thousands of years of history. Essentially it's a city the British built because they thought the natural harbour would be useful to the navy. They reclaimed land to join together seven islands into what is now the peninsula of south Bombay, then they built a fort and the city grew around it.
- You can't be elected dog-catcher in America unless you're a Christian. For someone like me who spent a lot of his adult life in England and western Europe,it's probably the biggest single difference between the United States and the rest of the western democracies.
- Education changes the world. If you have generations of children being brought up in extremist madrasas to believe that that world view is the correct world view, then you create generations of people with built-in hostilities. Even if nothing had happened to exacerbate those hostilities, even if there had not been an Iraq war, the mindset of generations, particularly of young men, has been badly affected. You see that anti-semitism is taken for granted, and that a highly misogynistic world view is propagated, where the role of women is cast as secondary. And when you get to other issues like the treatment of religious minorities or sexual minorities, there's a fantastic hostility. So you're bringing up generations of bigoted children.
- [on a forced shutdown in Sri Lanka during the filming of 'Midnight's Children'] We lost two day's shooting and a lot of sleep. It's clear that there was somebody in the Iranian foreign ministry - I don't know who, and I don't know at how high a level it was, but someone - said to the Sri Lankan ambassador they they disapproved of the permission having been given [to film] and that it should be revoked. Fortunately Deepa [Mehta] as part of the process of planning the film, had personally been to see the president of Sri Lanka [as a project for]trying to develop the film industry in Sri Lanka, develop it as a location for filming, and that they saw this as being a kind of showcase for that. So they were very supportive of it.. The moment we got to the president's office he said, 'No,of course you must make your film'.
- [on how he managed to weather the storm over 'Satanic Verses'] Just by being bloody-minded. I think I'm tougher than I thought I was. One of the things...was that I just wanted to be myself... to keep writing books I wanted to write. I think, if you knew nothing about my life story, if you'd never seen anything about my life and all you had was my books to look at, there isn't a great rift in 1989. It's not that writing after that is radically different in the writing before that. I think [it] has its own continuity, and I've tried very hard to do that.
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