Midnight's Children (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, on June 19, 1947, just two months before the protagonist of Midnight's Children, whose birth coincides with the moment India receives its independence. He attended school in Bombay and in Rugby, England. At Cambridge, he joined the Cambridge Footlights theater company. After graduation, he lived with his family, which had moved to Pakistan in 1964, then he returned to England and worked for an advertising agency. In 1975 he published his first novel, Grimus, about a Native American who receives the gift of immortality. In 1976, he married Clarissa Luward, the first of four marriages.

Midnight's Children was published in 1981 and was an instant literary success, garnering the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers' Award and the English-Speaking Union Award. The book established Rushdie's international reputation. His next book, Shame, published in 1983, won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. He then published The Jaguar Smiles, a non-fiction account of his 1986 travels in Nicaragua.

In 1988 Rushdie published the book that put his picture on newscasts worldwide and made him a household name beyond the literary world. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, contained a section parodying the prophet Mohammed, offending millions of Muslims worldwide. On February 14, 1989, the government of Iran, led by the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, ordered a fatwa, or decree of death against Rushdie. The Iranian government lifted the fatwa in 1998, but extremist Muslim groups continued to call for his death. Rushdie has lived in constant fear of assassination, and as a result has had only a handful of public appearances since 1989: one notable appearance took place in 1999, when he joined the rock group U2 onstage to sing their song "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," which was inspired by a novel Rushdie published that year. After the fatwa was lifted, however, his public appearances became more frequent.

Rushdie's first marriage ended in 1987, and he was remarried the following year to author Marianne Wiggins, but that marriage ended soon after the fatwa was imposed. He was married to Elizabeth West from 1997 to 2004. In 2004 he married model/actress Padma Lakshmi. He has a son from his first marriage and a daughter from his second.

Rushdie continues to publish frequently. His most notable novel since The Satanic Verses was The Moor's Last Sigh, published in 1994. His two books of essays, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981 – 1991 and Step Across This Line:Collected Non-fiction 1992 – 2002, are considered virtuoso performances. His ninth novel is 2005's Shalimar the Clown, about the assassination of a U.S. antiterrorism expert by his Kashmiri chauffeur.