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Portrait of Salman Rushdie

Literature · Novelists

Salman Rushdie

born 1947 · Indian-born British-American

Magic realism; postcolonial fiction

Sir Salman Rushdie is a Bombay-born novelist whose Midnight's Children, the story of children born at the moment of Indian independence, won the 1981 Booker Prize and was later named the best Booker winner of all. The Satanic Verses (1988) led Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his death in 1989, forcing years in hiding, and in 2022 he survived a knife attack in New York State that cost him the sight of one eye.

How to spot them

  • ▸Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947
  • ▸The fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini, 14 February 1989; the pseudonym 'Joseph Anton'
  • ▸Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha falling from an exploded airliner
  • ▸Booker of Bookers (1993) and Best of the Booker (2008)
  • ▸Stabbed on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in 2022; memoir Knife

Key works

Midnight's Children (1981)

Booker winner: Saleem Sinai, born at India's independence, is telepathically linked to the other 'midnight's children'

Shame (1983)

Magic-realist allegory of Pakistan's politics

The Satanic Verses (1988)

Two Indian actors survive a plane explosion and are transformed; its treatment of the Prophet Muhammad prompted the fatwa

Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)

Children's fable about a storyteller who loses his gift of the gab, written for his son while in hiding

The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)

Family saga of Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby, from Cochin to Bombay and Spain

Joseph Anton (2012)

Third-person memoir of his years under the fatwa, titled after his police-protection alias

Victory City (2023)

Epic of the poet-sorceress Pampa Kampana, who conjures the city of Bisnaga into being

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024)

Memoir of surviving the 2022 stabbing and his recovery

Key ideas

  • Uses magic realism and Bombay English to rewrite national history from the margins
  • Became an international symbol of free expression after the fatwa
  • 'Chutnification' of history: Saleem Sinai pickles his memories like chutneys

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Bombay (Mumbai) on 19 June 1947; educated at Rugby School and King's College, Cambridge
  • •Worked as an advertising copywriter before becoming a full-time novelist; his first novel was Grimus (1975)
  • •The alias Joseph Anton combines the first names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov
  • •His Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered in 1991
  • •Knighted in 2007 and appointed a Companion of Honour in 2022
  • •Stabbed on 12 August 2022 at the Chautauqua Institution, New York; he lost the sight in his right eye
  • •His attacker, Hadi Matar, was convicted of attempted murder in 2025 and of federal terrorism charges in July 2026
  • •Announced in September 2026 as recipient of the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
  • •Quichotte (2019), a reworking of Don Quixote, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources