Salman Rushdie

Early life

Rushdie was born into a Kashmiri Muslim family on 19 June 1947 in Bombay, known as Mumbai since 1995, in British India. He is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge-educated lawyer-turned-businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher. His father was dismissed from the Indian Civil Services (ICS) after it emerged that the birth certificate submitted by him had changes to make him appear younger than he was. Rushdie has three sisters. He wrote in his memoir, Joseph Anton, that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Ibn Rushd. Rushdie recalled his "first literary influence": "When I first saw The Wizard of Oz it made a writer of me." He recalled: "Every child in India in my day (and probably still) was obsessed with P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I read mountains of books by both." Rushdie has his ancestral home built by his grandfather named Anees Villa in Solan, Himachal Pradesh.

Rushdie also recalled that "Alice captured my imagination as few other books did: both the books, not just Alice's Adventures in Wonderland but Through the Looking-Glass as well, and I can still recite the whole of "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from memory. I also loved the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome because of the unimaginable freedom those young people sailing in the Lake District were given by their families ... When I was 16, I read The Lord Of The Rings and became obsessed, and can still recite the inscription on the Ruling Ring ('One ring to rule them all...') in the dark language of Mordor. I read an astonishing amount of Golden Age science fiction, not just Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut but more arcane writers like Clifford D. Simak, James Blish, Zenna Henderson and L. Sprague de Camp." He has written about his family following the Indian custom of kissing holy books if they were dropped on the floor. "But we kissed everything. We kissed dictionaries and atlases. We kissed Enid Blyton novels and Superman comics. If I'd ever dropped the telephone directory I'd probably have kissed that, too."

While in India, Rushdie was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School. He immigrated to England in 1961 and attended Rugby School. He then attended Cambridge as an undergraduate student at King's College, graduating in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

Career

Copywriter

Rushdie worked as a copywriter for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker (until 1982), for whom he wrote the line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. Collaborating with musician Ronnie Bond, Rushdie wrote the words for an advertising record on behalf of the now defunct Burnley Building Society that was recorded at Good Earth Studios, London. The song was called "The Best Dreams" and was sung by George Chandler. It was while at Ogilvy that Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter's, calling her "the first great writer I ever met".

Literary works

Rushdie's works are often categorized as postmodern, particularly within the tradition of Magic Realism. However, they also reveal early signs of a literary and cultural shift beyond postmodernism. In our contemporary world – saturated with reality TV, talk shows and other forms of pure entertainment – apathy, passivity and inaction have become defining features. Jeffrey T. Nealon identifies this prevailing sense of disengagement as a hallmark of the post-postmodern condition, which is sometimes referred to as metamodernism: "we post-postmodern capitalists are trained by our media masters to watch rather than act, consume rather than do." The overt political tensions of the Cold War era have been replaced by a more insidious, media-driven culture of distraction and spectacle. In response, Rushdie's works blend fantasy with realism to jolt readers out of this stupor, challenging delusions and encouraging renewed critical awareness.

Rushdie's debut, the science fiction tale Grimus (1975), was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children (1981), put him on the map. It follows the life of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the birth of the modern nation of India. Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, Rushdie refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating, "People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you. In that sense, I've never felt that I've written an autobiographical character." Rushdie writes of his "debt to the oral narrative traditions of India and also to the great novelists Jane Austen and Charles Dickens—Austen for her portraits of brilliant women caged by the social convention of their time, women whose Indian counterparts I knew well; Dickens for his great, rotting, Bombay-like city, and his ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyperrealistic background."

Shortly after its publication, V. S. Pritchett wrote: "In Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight's Children, India has produced a glittering novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. Like García Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, he weaves a whole people's capacity for carrying its inherited myths—and new ones that it goes on generating—into a kind of magic carpet. The human swarm swarms in every man and woman as they make their bid for life and vanish into the passion or hallucination that hangs about them like the smell of India itself. Yet at the same time there are strange Western echoes, of the irony of Sterne in Tristram Shandy—that early nonlinear writer—in Rushdie's readiness to tease by breaking off or digressing at the gravest moments. This is very odd in an Indian novel! The book is really about the mystery of being born and the puzzle of who one is." Midnight's Children won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, the Best of the Bookers and Booker of Bookers special prizes.

Critical reception

Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 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. In 1981, he was awarded the prize. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and, in the UK, was a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International Dublin Literary Award. Rushdie's works have spawned 30 book-length studies and more than 700 articles on his writing. He is frequently mentioned a favourite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Academic and other activities

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

Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival. At Emory University he was Distinguished Writer in Residence in the English Department from 2006 to 2011 and University Distinguished Professor until 2015; he has also deposited his archives there. In addition to teaching at Emory University, Rushdie has held an academic appointment as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College in the school's creative writing department, as well as serving as the schools commencement speaker in 1996. In May 2008, Rushdie was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2014, he taught a seminar on British Literature and served as the 2015 keynote speaker In September 2015, he joined the New York University Journalism Faculty as a Distinguished Writer in Residence.

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. He 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, D.C., and a patron of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He is a laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Film and television

Though he enjoys writing, Rushdie says he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. From early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood films (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances).

Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He 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, 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. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynaecologist in the film adaptation (Hunt's directorial debut) of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me. In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO programme Real Time with Bill Maher. Rushdie has said that he was approached for a cameo in Talladega Nights: "They had this idea, just one shot in which three very, very unlikely people were seen as NASCAR drivers. And I think they approached Julian Schnabel, Lou Reed, and me. We were all supposed to be wearing the uniforms and the helmet, walking in slow motion with the heat haze." In the end, their schedules did not allow for it. In 2009, 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.

Rushdie collaborated on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film was also called Midnight's Children. Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, and Irrfan Khan participated in the film. Production began in September 2010; the film was released in 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 projects including Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shaun of the Dead. In 2017, 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.

The Satanic Verses and the fatwa

The publication of The Satanic Verses by Viking Penguin Publishing in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was seen by some to be an irreverent depiction of prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is referenced in the book. According to this tradition, prophet Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (Ayah) to the Quran accepting three Arabian pagan goddesses who were worshiped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gabriel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities, including India, Iran, Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore, Venezuela, and Pakistan. In total, 20 countries banned the book.

In response to the protests, on 22 January 1989, Rushdie published a column in The Observer that called Muhammad "one of the great geniuses of world history," but noted that Islamic doctrine holds Muhammad to be human, and in no way perfect. He held that the novel is not "an anti-religious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations."

On 14 February 1989—Valentine's Day, and also the day of his close friend Bruce Chatwin's funeral—a fatwa ordering Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam". Chapter IV of the book depicts the character of an Imam in exile who returns to incite revolt from the people of his country with no regard for their safety. According to Khomeini's son, his father never read the book. A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years. On 7 March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.

In 1989, The New York Times published "Words For Salman Rushdie": "28 distinguished writers born in 21 countries speak to him from their common land – the country of literature. For expressing their ideas publicly in the past many of these writers have suffered censorship, exile – forced or self-imposed – and imprisonment." Czesław Miłosz wrote: "I have particular reasons to defend your rights, Mr. Rushdie. My books have been forbidden in many countries or have had whole passages censored out. I'm grateful to people who stood then by the principle of free expression, and I back you now in my turn." Ralph Ellison: "You deserve the full and passionate solidarity of any man of dignity, but I am afraid this is too little. This story of a man alone against worldwide intolerance, and of a book alone against the craziness of the media, can become the story of many others. The bell tolls for all of us." Umberto Eco: "Keep to your convictions. Try to protect yourself. A death sentence is a rather harsh review." Anita Desai: "Silence, exile and cunning, yes. And courage."

Failed assassination attempt (1989)

On 3 August 1989, while a man using the alias Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh was priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosives in a hotel in Paddington, Central London, the bomb exploded prematurely, destroying two floors of the hotel and killing Mazeh. A previously unknown Lebanese group, the Organization of the Mujahidin of Islam, said he died preparing an attack "on the apostate Rushdie". There is a shrine in Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery for Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh that says he was "Martyred in London, 3 August 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie." Mazeh's mother was invited to relocate to Iran, and the Islamic World Movement of Martyrs' Commemoration built his shrine in the cemetery that holds thousands of Iranian soldiers slain in the Iran–Iraq War.

Translators attacked

In 1991 an Italian translator of the book was stabbed but survived. Days later Hitoshi Igarashi, its Japanese translator, was stabbed to death. Two years later its Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot three times but survived.

Hezbollah's comments (2006)

During the 2006 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that "If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so. I am sure there are millions of Muslims who are ready to give their lives to defend our prophet's honour and we have to be ready to do anything for that."

International Guerillas (1990)

In 1990, soon after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a Pakistani film entitled International Gorillay (International Guerillas) was released that depicted Rushdie as a "James Bond-style villain" plotting to cause the downfall of Pakistan by opening a chain of casinos and discos in the country; he is ultimately killed at the end of the movie. The film was popular with Pakistani audiences, and it "presents Rushdie as a Rambo-like figure pursued by four Pakistani guerrillas". The British Board of Film Classification refused to allow it a certificate; "it was felt that the portrayal of Rushdie might qualify as criminal libel, causing a breach of the peace as opposed to merely tarnishing his reputation." This effectively prevented the release of the film in the UK. Two months later, however, 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. He later said, "If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town: everyone would have seen it". While the film was a great hit in Pakistan, it went virtually unnoticed elsewhere.

Al-Qaeda hit list (2010)

In 2010, Anwar al-Awlaki published an Al-Qaeda hit list in Inspire magazine, including Rushdie along with other figures claimed to have insulted Islam, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, cartoonist Lars Vilks, and three Jyllands-Posten staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose. The list was later expanded to include Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, who was murdered in a terror attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, along with 11 other people. After the attack, Al-Qaeda called for more killings.

Rushdie expressed his support for Charlie Hebdo, saying "I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity ... religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today." In response to the attack, Rushdie commented on what he perceived as victim-blaming in the media, stating: "You can dislike Charlie Hebdo.... But the fact that you dislike them has nothing to do with their right to speak. The fact you dislike them certainly doesn't in any way excuse their murder."

Jaipur Literature Festival (2012)

Rushdie was due to appear at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012 in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. However, he later cancelled his event appearance, and a further tour of India at the time, citing a possible threat to his life as the primary reason. Several days after, he indicated that state police agencies had lied, to keep him away, when they informed him that paid assassins were being sent to Jaipur to kill him. Police contended that they were afraid Rushdie would read from the banned The Satanic Verses, and that the threat was real, considering imminent protests by Muslim organizations.

Meanwhile, Indian authors Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar abruptly left the festival, and Jaipur, after reading excerpts from Rushdie's banned novel at the festival. The four were urged to leave by organizers as there was a real possibility they would be arrested.

A proposed video link session between Rushdie and the Jaipur Literature Festival was also cancelled at the last minute after the government pressured the festival to stop it. Rushdie returned to India to address a conference in New Delhi on 16 March 2012.

2022 murder attempt

On 12 August 2022, while about to start a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, Rushdie was attacked by a man who rushed onto the stage and stabbed him repeatedly, including in the face, neck and abdomen. The attacker was pulled away before being taken into custody by a state trooper; Rushdie was airlifted to UPMC Hamot, a tertiary trauma center in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he underwent surgery before being put on a ventilator.

Security measures at UPMC Hamot were increased due to the potential threat of further attempts on his life. This included 24-hour protection with a security officer outside his room and searches being performed upon entry into the hospital. The suspect was identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar of Fairview, New Jersey. Later in the day, Rushdie's agent, Andrew Wylie, confirmed that Rushdie had sustained stab injuries to the liver and hand, and that he might lose an eye. A day later, Rushdie was taken off the ventilator and was able to speak.

On 23 October 2022, Wylie reported that Rushdie had survived the murder attempt, but had lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand. Rushdie's memoir about the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was published in April 2024. It hit number one in the Sunday Times Bestsellers List in the General hardbacks category. In the memoir, Rushdie engages in fictional conversations with the assailant, who is referred to as "A".

The jury selection for the trial was originally scheduled to begin on 8 January 2024. However, Matar's lawyer successfully petitioned to delay the trial, arguing that his lawyers were entitled to see the memoir and any related materials before Matar stands trial, as the documents constitute evidence.

Rushdie recalled experiencing a vivid dream of being stabbed in an ancient Roman amphitheatre two days before the actual stabbing occurred. The intensity of the dream caused him to consider canceling the event until he eventually decided on attending.

In February 2025, the attacker, Hadi Matar, was found guilty of attempted murder and assault in connection with the stabbing. In May 2025, Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the attack. On 30 July 2026 the court found Hadi Matar guilty of federal "terrorism" charges, linked to the fatwa issued by Khomeini.

Awards, honours, and recognition

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

Awards and honours include:

Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1993)

Booker Prize (1981)

Doctor Honoris Causa (Dr.h.c.) from the University of Liège, Belgium (1999)

Golden PEN Award

Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award (2014)

Honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) from Indiana University (2018)

Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (Litt.D.) from Emory University (2015)

James Joyce Award from University College Dublin (2008)

Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Cultural Humanism from Harvard University (2007)

PEN Pinter Prize (UK)

St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates

Swiss Freethinkers Award 2019

2019 Humanist of the Year Award

Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association 2023

Knighthood

Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on 16 June 2007. He remarked: "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way." In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Parliamentarians of several of these countries condemned the action, and Iran and Pakistan called in their British envoys to protest formally. Controversial condemnation issued by Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq was in turn rebuffed by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at 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 Rushdie.

Al-Qaeda condemned the Rushdie honour. The group's then-leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was quoted as saying in an audio recording that the UK's award for Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response".

When asked if the knighthood was an insult to Muslims, Christopher Hitchens answered: "Midnight's Children did not just win the Booker, and Salman did not just later win the Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children won the main literary award in Iran, people tend to forget. When the fatwa was issued against him by a senile theocratic dictator who had run his own country into beggary and bankruptcy and misery, every Arab and Muslim writer worthy of the name, all signed, and wrote in a book for Salman, we identify our cause with you, and your struggle with free expression in our culture. If you say that Muslims are being offended by this, and you lump them all together, you immediately grant that they are in fact represented by the most extreme, homicidal, fanatical, illiterate, intolerant people who not only haven't read this book, but couldn't read it. And that's an insult to Islam!" Rushdie was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to literature.

Religious and political beliefs

Religious background

Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family, but he is an atheist. In a 2006 interview with PBS, Rushdie called himself a "hardline atheist".

In 1989, in an interview following the fatwa, 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. In another interview the same year, he said: "My point of view is that of a secular human being. I do not believe in supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu."

In December 1990, Rushdie issued a statement reaffirming his Muslim faith, distancing himself from statements made by characters in Satanic Verses that cast aspersions on Islam or Prophet Mohammad, and opposing the release of the paperback edition of the novel. Later, in 1992, he cited the release of the statement as perhaps his lowest point, regretting its language, which he said he had not written.

Rushdie advocates the application of higher criticism, pioneered during the late 19th century. In a guest opinion piece printed in The Washington Post and The Times in mid-August 2005, Rushdie called for a reform in Islam.

What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air. ... It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it. ... Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

Rushdie is a critic of moral and cultural relativism. In an interview with Point of Inquiry in 2006, he described his view as follows:

We need all of us, whatever our background, to constantly examine the stories inside which and with which we live. We all live in stories, so called grand narratives. Nation is a story. Family is a story. Religion is a story. Community is a story. We all live within and with these narratives. And it seems to me that a definition of any living vibrant society is that you constantly question those stories. That you constantly argue about the stories. In fact the arguing never stops. The argument itself is freedom. It's not that you come to a conclusion about it. And through that argument you change your mind sometimes.… And that's how societies grow. When you can't retell for yourself the stories of your life then you live in a prison.… Somebody else controls the story.… Now it seems to me that we have to say that a problem in contemporary Islam is the inability to re-examine the ground narrative of the religion.… The fact that in Islam it is very difficult to do this, makes it difficult to think new thoughts.

Political background

In 2006, 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 (a veil that covers all of the face except the eyes). Rushdie stated that his three sisters would never wear the veil. He said: "I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm completely on Straw's side."

Rushdie supported the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, leading historian Tariq Ali to label Rushdie part of what he considered to be "warrior writers" as "the belligerati". He 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. He stated that while there was a "case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussein", US unilateral military intervention was unjustifiable. Terry Eagleton, a former admirer of Rushdie's work and Marxist literary critic, criticized him, saying he "cheered on the Pentagon's criminal ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan." Eagleton subsequently apologized for having misrepresented Rushdie's views.

Rushdie supported the election of Barack Obama for the US presidency and has often criticized the Republican Party. He was involved in the Occupy Movement, both as a presence at Occupy Boston and as a founding member of Occupy Writers. 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. He acquired American citizenship in 2016 and voted for Hillary Clinton in that year's election.

Noting the rise of "populist authoritarian demagoguery" around the world, Rushdie said there was "a willingness amongst at least some part of the [US] population to cease to value the democratic values enshrined in the first amendment. So I think the problem is, I would now say, political more than primarily religious".

In the wake of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in March 2006 Rushdie signed the manifesto Together Facing the New Totalitarianism, a statement warning of the dangers of religious extremism. The Manifesto was published in the left-leaning French weekly Charlie Hebdo in March 2006. When Amnesty International suspended human rights activist Gita Sahgal for saying to the press that she thought the organization should distance itself from Moazzam Begg and his organization, Rushdie said: Amnesty…has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty's leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong. It has greatly compounded its error by suspending the redoubtable Gita Sahgal for the crime of going public with her concerns. Gita Sahgal is a woman of immense integrity and distinction. ... It is people like Gita Sahgal who are the true voices of the human rights movement; Amnesty and Begg have revealed, by their statements and actions, that they deserve our contempt.

Personal life

In 1976, Rushdie married Clarissa Luard, literature officer of the Arts Council of England, with whom he has a son. Rushdie left Clarissa in the mid-1980s for Australian writer Robyn Davidson, to whom he was introduced by their mutual friend Bruce Chatwin, a fellow writer. Rushdie and Davidson never married, and had separated by the time his divorce from Clarissa came through in 1987. Rushdie and American writer Marianne Wiggins married the next year.

In 1991, Rushdie bought a safe house at 9 The Bishops Avenue in the London Borough of Barnet, where he lived with his family from the next year until his immigration to the United States in 2000. Rushdie and Wiggins divorced in 1993. In 1997, Rushdie married British editor and writer Elizabeth West, with whom he has a son. The couple separated after a miscarriage.

In 1999, Rushdie underwent an operation to correct ptosis. According to Rushdie, ptosis had made it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. He stated: "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all."

Since his immigration, Rushdie has lived mostly near Union Square, Manhattan, New York City. Rushdie married Indian-American television presenter and model Padma Lakshmi in 2004 after divorcing Elizabeth West the same year. At the time of their first meeting in 1999, Rushdie was 51 years old, while Lakshmi was 28 years old. Lakshmi asked for a divorce in January 2007, according to Rushdie, and the couple filed for it in July. She has criticized him as insecure and spoiled, stating that he constantly craved praise and demanded "frequent sex". Lakshmi has claimed that Rushdie had referred to her as a "bad investment" and was insensitive to her painful endometriosis. Rushdie and American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths married in 2021.

Rushdie is a fan of the English football club Tottenham Hotspur. He has been a holder of the Person of Indian Origin Card, which grants certain rights to people of the Indian diaspora short of full citizenship.

Rushdie's niece is the pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen.

Works

Novels

Grimus (1975)

Midnight's Children (1981)

Shame (1983)

The Satanic Verses (1988)

The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)

The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)

Fury (2001)

Shalimar the Clown (2005)

The Enchantress of Florence (2008)

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015)

The Golden House (2017)

Quichotte (2019)

Victory City (2023)

Short story collections

East, West (1994)

The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories (2025)

Children's books

Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)

Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)

Essays and criticism

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1992)

Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992–2002 (2002)

Languages of Truth: Essays, 2003–2020 (2021)

Also:

In Good Faith (1990) — an essay on The Satanic Verses published as a pamphlet by Granta Books

The Wizard of Oz, BFI Film Classics (1992) — a study of the film published by the British Film Institute

Memoirs

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)

Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024)

As editor

Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997 (1997) — edited with Elizabeth West

The Best American Short Stories (2008) — guest editor