Rushdie was born in Mumbai and attended the English boarding school Rugby before studying history at Cambridge University. Salman Rushdie, 75, was stabbed in an attack at a speaking event in New York state on Friday. In 1981, his second novel, ‘Midnight’s Children,’ catapulted him into the spotlight. For its depiction of post-independence India, the book received international acclaim and Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize.
His 1988 book ‘The Satanic Verses’ sparked a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for his death issued by Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Some Muslims viewed the novel as disrespectful to the Prophet Mohammed.
Rushdie comes out of hiding;
Born in Mumbai, India, was forced to flee after a bounty was placed on his head. Following the murder or attempted murder of his translators and publishers, the British government granted him police protection in Britain, where he was attending school and making his home.
He was in hiding for nearly a decade, moving houses several times and unable to tell his children where he was. Rushdie only began to emerge from his exile in the late 1990s, after Iran declared in 1998 that it would not back his assassination. He became a regular on the international party circuit, even appearing in films like ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ and the US television sitcom ‘Seinfeld’. He has been married four times and has two children.
Rushdie attended the English boarding school Rugby before studying history at the University of Cambridge. He began in advertising, coining slogans such as ‘naughty but nice’ for cream cakes, which became common parlance. While Rushdie has become an avid social media user in recent years, the author has stated that he is glad the fatwa controversy occurred before the advent of the internet. ‘ There was essentially no email, no text messages, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Web, and that, of course, slowed down the attack,’ he said in 2012.
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