Background

RUSHDIE, Ahmed Salman was born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, India. Son of Anis Ahmed and Negin (nee Butt) Rushdie.

Education

Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School, Bombay, Rugby School, England, King's College, Cambridge.

Career

Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising copywriter, and his first published novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975. Rushdie’s next novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), a fable about modern India, was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. A film adaptation, for which he drafted the screenplay, was released in 2012.

The novel Shame (1983), based on contemporary politics in Pakistan, was also popular, but Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, encountered a different reception. Some of the adventures in this book depict a character modeled on the Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and his transcription of the Qurʾān in a manner that, after the novel’s publication in the summer of 1988, drew criticism from Muslim community leaders in Britain, who denounced the novel as blasphemous. Public demonstrations against the book spread to Pakistan in January 1989. On February 14 the spiritual leader of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, publicly condemned the book and issued a fatwā (legal opinion) against Rushdie; a bounty was offered to anyone who would execute him. He went into hiding under the protection of Scotland Yard, and—although he occasionally emerged unexpectedly, sometimes in other countries—he was compelled to restrict his movements. Despite the standing death threat, Rushdie continued to write, producing Imaginary Homelands (1991), a collection of essays and criticism; the children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990); the short-story collection East, West (1994); and the novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). In 1998, after nearly a decade, the Iranian government announced that it would no longer seek to enforce its fatwā against Rushdie. He later recounted his experience in the third-person memoir Joseph Anton (2012); its title refers to an alias he adopted while in seclusion.

Following his return to public life, Rushdie published the novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001). Step Across This Line, a collection of essays he wrote between 1992 and 2002 on subjects from the September 11 attacks to The Wizard of Oz, was issued in 2002. Rushdie’s subsequent novels include Shalimar the Clown (2005), an examination of terrorism that was set primarily in the disputed Kashmir region of the Indian subcontinent, and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), based on a fictionalized account of the Mughal emperor Akbar. The children’s book Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) centres on the efforts of Luka—younger brother to the protagonist of Haroun and the Sea of Stories—to locate the titular fire and revive his ailing father.

Rushdie received the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children. The novel subsequently won the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of the Booker (2008). These special prizes were voted on by the public in honour of the prize’s 25th and 40th anniversaries, respectively. Rushdie was knighted in 2007, an honour criticized by the Iranian government and Pakistan’s parliament.

Rushdie is currentlycollaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film will be called Midnight's Children. Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, and Irrfan Khan are confirmed as participating in the film.Production began in September 2010; the film will be released on 26 October 2012.

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 also serve as an executive producer. The new series, to be called The Next People, will be, according to Rushdie, "a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people." The idea of a television series was suggested by his US agents, said Rushdie, who felt that television would allow him more creative control than feature film. The Next People is being made by the British film production company Working Title, the firm behind such projects as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shaun of the Dead.

Works

• Other Work

  • Bibliography

  • Grimus 1975, Midnight’s Children 1981, Shame 1983, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey 1987, The Satanic Verses 1988, Is Nothing Sacred (lecture) 1990, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (novel) 1990, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 1991. And has written articles for New York Times, Washington Post, The Times and Sunday Times, etc.

Membership

Footlights revue, University of Cambridge 1965-1968. Institute PEN since 1981, Society of Authors since 1983. Camden Committee Community Relations 1977-1983.

• Fellow: Royal Society Lit.; American Academy of Arts and Letters (honorary)

Interests

• Films, chess, table tennis, involvement in politics, especially race relations.

Connections

Married 1st Clarissa Luard in 1976 (divorced in 1987). Married 2nd Marianne Wiggins in 1988 (separated in 1989).

Father:

Anis Ahmed Rushdie

University of Cambridge-educated lawyer turned businessman

Mother:

Negin Bhatt

1-st wife:

Clarissa Luard

(1976–1987)

2-nd wife:

Marianne Wiggins

(1988–1993)

Marianne Wiggins (born September 8, 1947) is an American author. She is noted for the unusual characters and storylines in her novels.

She has won the Whiting Writers' Award, an NEA award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.

3-rd wife:

Elizabeth West

(1997–2004)

Son:

Zafar

born 1980

Son:

Milan

born 1999

4-th wife:

Padma Lakshmi

(2004–2007)

Padma Parvati Lakshmi ( born September 1, 1970) is an Indian-born American cookbook author, actress, model and television host. Her debut cookbook Easy Exotic won her the "Best First Book" award at the 1999 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. She has been the host of the US reality television program Top Chef since season two in 2006, for which she received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program. In 2010, Top Chef won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program.