Authors
Salman Rushdie
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Salman Rushdie is a British-American novelist, a major figure in Postcolonial Literature alongside Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. His novel Midnight's Children (1981), narrated by a child born at the exact moment of Indian independence, won the Booker Prize and was later named the Best of the Booker on two separate anniversary occasions. His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses prompted a fatwa issued by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989 calling for Rushdie's death, forcing him into years of police protection. On August 12, 2022, while preparing to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly by an attacker and lost sight in one eye; he wrote about the attack and his recovery in the memoir Knife (2024).
Facts
Learn More
The Book That Brought a Fatwa
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in September 1988 and drew immediate controversy for passages many Muslims considered blasphemous toward Islam. On February 14, 1989, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death and offering a bounty to anyone who carried it out, forcing Rushdie into years of police protection under an assumed identity in Britain. The Iranian government publicly distanced itself from actively enforcing the fatwa in a 1998 agreement with the United Kingdom, though the bounty and the underlying religious edict were never formally withdrawn by religious authorities in Iran.
Writing After the Attack
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On August 12, 2022, as Salman Rushdie was about to take the stage to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, a man rushed the stage and stabbed him repeatedly in the face, neck and abdomen; Rushdie survived but lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand. His attacker, who told investigators he had read only a small portion of The Satanic Verses, was later convicted and sentenced to prison. Rushdie wrote about the attack, his hospitalization and his recovery in the memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, published in 2024.
Cross-Tradition Connections
In Movement
Major figure in Postcolonial Literature; Midnight's Children (1981) broadened the movement's canon beyond its African anchors into South Asian postcolonial writing.
Works Attributed
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.