80 Facts About Salman Rushdie

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British and American novelist.

On 12 August 2022, a man stabbed Salman Rushdie after rushing onto the stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at an event in Chautauqua, New York.

In 1983, Salman Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Salman Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature.

Salman Rushdie was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015.

Salman Rushdie was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Salman Rushdie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on 19 June 1947 during the British Raj, into an Indian Kashmiri Muslim family.

Salman Rushdie is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge-educated lawyer-turned-businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher.

Salman Rushdie's father was dismissed from the Indian Civil Services after it emerged that the birth certificate submitted by him had changes to make him appear younger than he was.

Salman Rushdie wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes.

Salman Rushdie grew up in Bombay and was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort, South Bombay, before moving to England to attend Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, and then King's College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

Salman Rushdie has married five times and divorced four times, and has had at least one other significant relationship.

Salman Rushdie was first married to Clarissa Luard, literature officer of the Arts Council of England, from 1976 to 1987.

Salman Rushdie left Clarissa Luard in the mid-1980s for the Australian writer Robyn Davidson, to whom he was introduced by their common friend Bruce Chatwin.

Salman Rushdie's third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was British editor and author Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan, born in 1997.

In 2004, very shortly after his third divorce, Salman Rushdie married Padma Lakshmi, an Indian-born actress, model, and host of the American reality-television show Top Chef.

Salman Rushdie stated that Lakshmi had asked for a divorce in January 2007, and later that year, in July, the couple filed it.

In 2021, Salman Rushdie married American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

In 1999, Salman Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a problem with the levator palpebrae superioris muscle that causes drooping of the upper eyelid.

Since 2000, Salman Rushdie has lived in the United States, mostly near Union Square in Lower Manhattan, New York City.

Salman Rushdie is a fan of the English football club Tottenham Hotspur.

Salman Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called The Jaguar Smile.

Salman Rushdie became interested in Nicaragua after he had been a neighbour of Madame Somoza, wife of the former Nicaraguan dictator, and his son Zafar was born around the time of the Nicaraguan revolution.

The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book; hence Salman Rushdie is credited as the lyricist.

Salman Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter's and praised her highly in the foreword of her collection Burning your Boats.

In 2012, Salman Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack, when he published his short story "In the South" on the platform.

The book is Salman Rushdie's first released work since he was attacked and injured in 2022.

Salman Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels.

Salman Rushdie's works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, in 1981 for Midnight's Children, 1983 for Shame, 1988 for The Satanic Verses, 1995 for The Moor's Last Sigh, and in 2019 for Quichotte.

Salman Rushdie's 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and, in the UK, was a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards.

Salman Rushdie's works have spawned 30 book-length studies and over 700 articles on his writing.

Salman Rushdie is frequently mentioned a favourite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Salman Rushdie has mentored younger Indian writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general.

Salman Rushdie opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers, published by Penguin in November 2005.

Salman Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival.

Salman Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation that provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa.

Salman Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, DC, and a patron of Humanists UK.

Salman Rushdie is a laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.

Salman Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings.

Salman Rushdie had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes.

On 12 May 2006, Salman Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests.

Salman Rushdie appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me.

In 2009, Salman Rushdie signed a petition in support of film director Roman Polanski, calling for his release after Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

Salman Rushdie collaborated on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta.

Salman Rushdie announced in June 2011 that he had written the first draft of a script for a new television series for the US cable network Showtime, a project on which he will serve as an executive producer.

In 2017, Salman Rushdie appeared as himself in episode 3 of season 9 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, sharing scenes with Larry David to offer advice on how Larry should deal with the fatwa that has been ordered against him.

When we played Wembley, Salman Rushdie showed up in person and the stadium erupted.

Salman Rushdie had a backstage pass and he used it as often as possible.

On 26 August 2008, Salman Rushdie received an apology at the High Court in London from all three parties.

Two months later Salman Rushdie himself wrote to the board, saying that while he thought the film "a distorted, incompetent piece of trash", he would not sue if it were released.

Salman Rushdie later said, "If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town: everyone would have seen it".

Salman Rushdie was due to appear at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012 in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.

Police contended that they were afraid Salman Rushdie would read from the banned The Satanic Verses, and that the threat was real, considering imminent protests by Muslim organizations.

Salman Rushdie returned to India to address a conference in New Delhi on 16 March 2012.

On 12 August 2022, while about to start a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, Salman Rushdie was attacked by a man who rushed onto the stage and stabbed him repeatedly, including in the neck and abdomen.

The attacker was pulled away before being taken into custody by a state trooper; Salman Rushdie was airlifted to UPMC Hamot, a tertiary trauma centre in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he underwent surgery before being put on a ventilator.

On 23 October 2022, Wylie reported that Salman Rushdie had lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand but survived the murder attempt.

Salman Rushdie has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany, and many of literature's highest honours.

Salman Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on 16 June 2007.

Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Salman Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Salman Rushdie.

Salman Rushdie was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to literature.

Salman Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family, but he is an atheist.

In 1989, in an interview following the fatwa, Salman Rushdie said that he was in a sense a lapsed Muslim, though "shaped by Muslim culture more than any other," and a student of Islam.

Salman Rushdie favours calling things by their true names and constantly argues about what is wrong and what is right.

Salman Rushdie condemned the Charlie Hebdo shooting and defended comedic criticism of religions in a comment originally posted on English PEN where he called religions a medieval form of unreason.

Salman Rushdie called the attack a consequence of "religious totalitarianism", which according to him had caused "a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam".

In 2006, Salman Rushdie stated that he supported comments by Jack Straw, then-Leader of the House of Commons from Labour, who criticized the wearing of the niqab.

Salman Rushdie stated that his three sisters would never wear the veil.

Salman Rushdie supported the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, leading leftist historian Tariq Ali to label Salman Rushdie and other "warrior writers" as "the belligerati".

Salman Rushdie was supportive of the US-led campaign to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, which began in 2001 but was a vocal critic of the 2003 war in Iraq.

Salman Rushdie has stated that while there was a "case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussein", US unilateral military intervention was unjustifiable.

Salman Rushdie supported the election of Democrat Barack Obama for the American presidency and has often criticized the Republican Party.

Salman Rushdie was involved in the Occupy Movement, both as a presence at Occupy Boston and as a founding member of Occupy Writers.

Salman Rushdie is a supporter of gun control, blaming a shooting at a Colorado cinema in July 2012 on the American right to keep and bear arms.

Salman Rushdie acquired American citizenship in 2016 and voted for Hillary Clinton in that year's election.

Salman Rushdie has expressed his preference for India over Pakistan on numerous occasions in writing and on live television interviews.

In one such interview in 2003, Salman Rushdie claimed "Pakistan sucks" after being asked about why he felt more like an outsider there than in India or England.

Salman Rushdie cited India's diversity, openness, and "richness of life experience" as his preference over Pakistan's "airlessness", resulting from lack of personal freedom, widespread public corruption, and inter-ethnic tension.

In Indian politics, Salman Rushdie has criticized the Bharatiya Janata Party and its chairperson, current Prime Minister Narendra Modi.