Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, to a middle-class Muslim family. His paternal grandfather was an Urdu poet, and his father a Cambridge-educated businessman. At the age of fourteen Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England. In 1964 Rushdie’s parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan, joining reluctantly the Muslim exodus—during these years there was a war between India and Pakistan, and the choosing of sides and divided loyalties burdened Rushdie heavily.
Rushdie continued his studies at King’s College, Cambridge, where he read history. After graduating in 1968 he worked for a time in television in Pakistan. He was an actor in a theatre group at the Oval House in Kennington and from 1971 to 1981 he worked intermittently as a freelance advertising copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather and Charles Barker.
As a novelist Rushdie made his debut with Grimus in 1975, an exercise in fantastical science fiction, which draws on the 12th-century Sufi poem The Conference of Birds. The title of the novel is an anagram of the name ‘Simurg’, the immense, all-wise, fabled bird of pre-Islamic Persian mythology. Rushdie’s the next novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), won the Booker Prize and brought him international fame. Midnight’s Children tookits title from Nehru’s speech delivered at the stroke of midnight, 14 August 1947, at India gained its independence from England.
Shame (1983) centered on a well-to-do Pakistani family, using the family history as a metaphor for the country. Haroun And The Sea Of Stories (1990) was written for children, and wove into the story an affable robot, genies, talking fish, dark villains, and an Arabian princess in need of saving.
Rushdie won in 1988 the Whitbread Award with his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses.
The novel was banned in India and South Africa and burned on the streets of Bradford, Yorkshire. When Ayatollah Khomeini called on all zealous Muslims to execute the writer and the publishers of the book, Rushdie was forced into hiding. Also an aide to Khomeini offered a million-dollar reward for Rushdie’s death. In 1993 Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was wounded in an attack outside his house. In 1997 the reward was doubled, and the next year the highest Iranian state prosecutor Morteza Moqtadale renewed the death sentence. During this period of fatwa violent protest in India, Pakistan, and Egypt caused several deaths. In 1990 Rushdie published an essay In Good Faith to appease his critics and issued an apology in which he reaffirmed his respect for Islam. However, Iranian clerics did not repudiate their death threat.
Since the religious decree, Rushdie has shunned publicity, hiding from assassins, but he has continued to write and publish books. The Moors Last Sight (1995) focused on contemporary India. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) was set in the world of hedonistic rock stars, a mixture of mythology and elements from the repertoire of science fiction. In Fury (2001) Malik Solanka, a former Cambridge professor, tries to find a new life in New York City.
In 2006 Rushdie married a young lady Padmalakshmi, but their maital affairs could not continue for a long.
