Salman Rushdie

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, born 1947 in Bombay shortly before the partition of British India, is an Indian-born British-American novelist whose work blends magic realism, historical fabulation, and the languages of the South Asian diaspora. He was educated at the Cathedral School in Bombay, at Rugby School in England, and at King's College, Cambridge, where he read history.

After early work in advertising in London, he published the novel Midnight's Children in 1981, narrating Indian independence and partition through the life of a child born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947. The book won the Booker Prize that year, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008. Shame (1983), set in a fictionalized Pakistan, followed.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), provoked widespread protests across the Muslim world for its treatment of episodes from the life of Muhammad, and on 14 February 1989 the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for his death. Rushdie spent close to a decade under British police protection. His Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was murdered in 1991, and the Italian and Norwegian translators were attacked the same year.

Later novels include Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). He was knighted in 2007 and was seriously injured in a stabbing attack on stage in Chautauqua, New York, in 2022.

Salman is an Arabic masculine given name from a root meaning safe or peaceful; he carries the masculine form.