Jul 12, 2008
British author Salman Rushdie
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http://www.incentaclick.com/nclick.php?id=5318&cid=4336
British author Salman Rushdie won the "Best of the Booker" prize on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of one of the world's most prestigious literary awards.
Rushdie, 61, is best known for his novel "The Satanic Verses," which outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats that forced him to live in hiding. His novel "Midnight's Children" won the Booker Prize in 1981.
Here are some facts about Rushdie:
* EARLY LIFE:
-- Salman Rushdie was born to Muslim parents in Mumbai (Bombay) in June 1947, two months before Indian independence led to the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state.
-- At 13 he was sent to Rugby, one of Britain's most exclusive private schools. There he encountered racism for the first time, rejected by his peers despite his academic prowess. His essays were torn up and slogans were daubed on walls.
-- In 1965 he went to read history at King's College, Cambridge. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked briefly in television before returning to Britain, beginning work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, "Grimus", was published in 1975.
* FAME AND INFAMY:
-- Rushdie shot to fame in 1981 when his second novel, "Midnight's Children," a magical-realist exploration of Indian history, won the Booker Prize for Fiction. In 1993 the novel was judged to have been the "Booker of Bookers", the best novel to have won the prize in the award's 25-year history.
-- The 1988 "The Satanic Verses", which won him worldwide notoriety, is an allegorical fantasy about the struggle between good and evil, a surrealistic journey by an Asian immigrant into an alien Western environment which questions the tenets of Islam.
-- Book-burnings, riots across the Muslim world and calls for the novel to be banned culminated on February 14, 1989 with a death edict, or fatwa, proclaimed against Rushdie by Iran's then supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who deemed it blasphemous to Islam.
-- Rushdie went into hiding for nine years. In 1998 Iran's government formally distanced itself from the death warrant, but hardline groups in Iran regularly renew the call for his murder, saying Khomeini's fatwa is irrevocable.
-- In June 2007 Britain defended its decision to award a knighthood to the author after some Muslims complained that honouring the author of "The Satanic Verses" was offensive to Islam.
-- The knighthood, for services to literature, prompted diplomatic protests from Pakistan and Iran and triggered demonstrations in Pakistan and Malaysia.
* LATEST WORK:
-- His new novel, "The Enchantress of Florence", is an historical novel set in Renaissance Florence and the court of the Mughal Empire. It follows the tale of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. Rushdie's previous novel "Shalimar the Clown" was published in 2005.
by erectusplus at 12:36 AM |
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