Rushdie, Sir Salman

(sälmän´ r

sh´dē), 1947–, British novelist, b. Bombay (now Mumbai, India). He is known for the allusive richness of his language and the wide variety of Eastern and Western characters and cultures he explores. His first novels, including Midnight's Children (1981; Booker Prize; adapted for the stage by Rushdie, 2003) and Shame (1983), incorporate the technique of magic realism; elements of this approach can also be found in his later fiction. Parts of his allegorical novel The Satanic Verses (1988) were deemed sacrilegious and enraged many Muslims, including Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who in 1989 issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death. Violence occurred in some cities where the book was sold, and Rushdie went into hiding. From his seclusion he wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a novelistic allegory against censorship; East, West (1995), a book of short stories; and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), a novel that examines India's recent history through the life of a Jewish-Christian family. The Iranian government ended its support for the fatwa in 1998, but in 2004 an Iranian group offered a bounty for Rushdie's murder. Rushdie's next novel, The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), mingles myth and reality in a surreal world of rock-and-roll celebrity. He has also written the novels Fury (2001) and Shalimar the Clown (2005) and numerous essays, many of them included in Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002). Rushdie was knighted in 2007, provoking condemnation from some Muslims.