Salman Rushdie

• 1. Introduction

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  Salman Rushdie was born on the 19th of June 1947 in Bombay, in British India, into a world on the verge of shattering and remaking itself. Two months later, the British Raj ended, India gained independence, and the subcontinent was partitioned. That collision of history and personal fate would define everything Rushdie wrote. What does it mean to be born at the exact moment a civilisation cracks open? How does a writer shaped by Bombay, educated at Cambridge, and exiled to hiding rooms in Britain eventually become one of the most threatened and celebrated novelists of his era? This documentary follows those questions through a career spanning five decades, a fatwa issued on Valentine's Day, a stabbing that cost him sight in one eye, and a body of work that has generated more than 700 academic articles and 30 book-length studies.

• 2. A Reader Before a Writer

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  Rushdie's father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a Cambridge-educated lawyer turned businessman who adopted the family surname in honour of the medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd. That act of intellectual allegiance set the tone for a household where books were treated as near-sacred objects. Rushdie has written about the family following an Indian custom of kissing holy books if they were dropped on the floor. His family, he recalled, kissed everything: "We kissed dictionaries and atlases. We kissed Enid Blyton novels and Superman comics."

  His first named literary influence was unexpected. "When I first saw The Wizard of Oz it made a writer of me," he recalled. The Alice books were a close second; Rushdie has said he can still recite all of "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from memory. At 16, he read The Lord of the Rings and became, by his own account, obsessed. He can still recite the inscription on the Ruling Ring in what he calls "the dark language of Mordor." He also worked through large quantities of Golden Age science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, and more arcane names including Clifford D. Simak, James Blish, Zenna Henderson, and L. Sprague de Camp.

  He was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort, South Bombay, before moving to England in 1961. Rugby School in Warwickshire came next, then King's College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts in history. The Cambridge training in historical thinking would later show up in the densely layered timelines of his fiction.

• 3. The Copywriter Who Wrote a Masterpiece

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  Before Rushdie became a full-time novelist, he was writing advertising slogans. At Ogilvy and Mather he coined "irresistibubble" for Aero chocolate and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes. At the agency Ayer Barker he produced the line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. He also collaborated with musician Ronnie Bond on an advertising record for the Burnley Building Society, recorded at Good Earth Studios in London. The song was called "The Best Dreams" and was sung by George Chandler.

  It was while working at Ogilvy that Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children. The novel follows Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, endowed with special powers and a connection to every child born at that same moment. Critics immediately reached for comparisons with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. V. S. Pritchett wrote of Rushdie: "Like Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, he weaves a whole people's capacity for carrying its inherited myths into a kind of magic carpet."

  Midnight's Children won the 1981 Booker Prize. It then won the Best of the Bookers in 1993 and the Booker of Bookers in 2008, each time chosen as the best novel among all previous winners. Rushdie himself pushed back against autobiographical readings of Saleem Sinai: "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 written an autobiographical character." His sense of debt in writing the book was elsewhere: to Jane Austen for her portraits of women caged by social convention, and to Dickens for his "great, rotting, Bombay-like city" and his ability to root larger-than-life characters in a sharply observed near-realist background.

  A personal connection grounded Rushdie in the literary world at this time: Angela Carter, whom he called "the first great writer I ever met."

• 4. Valentine's Day, 1989

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  The Satanic Verses was published by Viking Penguin in September 1988. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition in which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have temporarily incorporated verses accepting three Arabian pagan goddesses into the Quran, only to revoke them later. The novel was banned in 20 countries, among them India, Iran, Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore, Venezuela, and Pakistan.

  On the 14th of February 1989, a fatwa ordering Rushdie's execution was broadcast on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini. The date was, as Rushdie has noted, Valentine's Day. It was also the day of the funeral of his close friend, the writer Bruce Chatwin. According to Khomeini's own son, his father never read the book.

  The response from other writers was immediate. The New York Times published a declaration by 28 distinguished writers from 21 countries. Czeslaw Milosz 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." Umberto Eco's contribution was characteristically dry: "Keep to your convictions. Try to protect yourself. A death sentence is a rather harsh review." Ralph Ellison wrote: "This story of a man alone against worldwide intolerance can become the story of many others. The bell tolls for all of us."

  Christopher Hitchens described the fatwa as "a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved." In the hate column: "dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation." In the love column: "literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defense of free expression." Rushdie later wrote that he and Hitchens had arrived at the same formulation independently: "everything I loved and valued was ranged against everything I detested." He said that through this he came to understand "that while I had not chosen the battle it was at least the right battle."

  On the 7th of March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the controversy. A bounty was offered for Rushdie's killing. A man using the alias Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh was priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosives in a Paddington hotel on the 3rd of August 1989 when it exploded prematurely. Two floors of the hotel were destroyed and Mazeh was killed. A shrine to him now stands in Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery with an inscription identifying him as "the first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie."

• 5. Living Under the Sentence

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  In 1991, an Italian translator of The Satanic Verses was stabbed and survived. Days later, the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death. Two years after that, the Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot three times and survived. The cumulative weight of these attacks made clear that the fatwa was not rhetoric alone.

  Rushdie was placed under police protection and moved through safe houses. In 1991, he bought a property at 9 The Bishops Avenue in the London Borough of Barnet, where he lived with his family until his move to the United States in 2000. His secret alias during these years was Joseph Anton, which became the title of his 2012 memoir about that period.

  On the 24th of September 1998, the Iranian government under President Mohammad Khatami gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie." The fatwa was never officially lifted. In early 2005, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirmed it. In February 2016, yet more money was added to the bounty. Rushdie has said that he receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on the 14th of February, letting him know the vow has not been forgotten. He has called it "my unfunny Valentine."

  Despite the danger, Rushdie appeared publicly at London's Wembley Stadium on the 11th of August 1993, during a U2 concert. U2 bassist Adam Clayton recalled in 2010 that Bono had been calling Rushdie's name from the stage on every night of the Zoo TV tour. When Rushdie appeared in person at Wembley, the stadium erupted. Clayton said: "For a man who was supposed to be in hiding, it was remarkably easy to see him around the place." Rushdie eventually acquired a backstage pass and used it regularly.

  In 2010, Anwar al-Awlaki included Rushdie on an Al-Qaeda hit list published in Inspire magazine alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, cartoonist Lars Vilks, and several Jyllands-Posten staff members. That same list was later expanded to include Stephane "Charb" Charbonnier, who was murdered in the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Rushdie responded to those killings: "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."

• 6. Chautauqua, 2022

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  On the 12th of August 2022, Rushdie was about to begin a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, when a man rushed onto the stage and stabbed him repeatedly, in the face, neck, and abdomen. He was airlifted to UPMC Hamot, a tertiary trauma center in Erie, Pennsylvania, and underwent surgery before being placed on a ventilator. The suspect was identified as Hadi Matar, 24 years old, of Fairview, New Jersey.

  Rushdie's agent, Andrew Wylie, confirmed that day that Rushdie had received stab injuries to the liver and hand and might lose an eye. By the following day, Rushdie had been taken off the ventilator and was able to speak. By October, Wylie reported that Rushdie had lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand but had survived.

  Rushdie has since disclosed that he experienced a vivid dream of being stabbed in an ancient Roman amphitheatre two days before the attack. The intensity of the dream made him consider canceling his appearance. He attended anyway.

  In February 2025, Hadi Matar was found guilty of attempted murder and assault. In May 2025, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Two of the men who came to Rushdie's aid at Chautauqua were awarded the Carnegie Medal for heroism in 2025. Rushdie's memoir about the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was published in April 2024. In it, Rushdie engages in fictional conversations with the assailant, referred to only as "A." The book reached number one on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List in the General hardbacks category and was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

• 7. The Body of Work

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  Rushdie's debut novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975 and was largely ignored. After Midnight's Children in 1981, Shame in 1983 depicted political turmoil in Pakistan through characters based on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and came close to winning the Booker. The Satanic Verses won the Whitbread Award in 1988. It was followed in 1990 by Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which Rushdie has described as written in the shadow of the fatwa: a defence of the power of stories over silence.

  The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995 was a family saga spanning roughly 100 years of India's history and won the Whitbread Award. The Ground Beneath Her Feet in 1999 was built on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, reimagined as rock stars. It included original song lyrics, one of which became the basis for the U2 song of the same name; Rushdie is credited as the lyricist.

  In 2008, The Enchantress of Florence appeared, centering on a European visitor to the Mughal Emperor Akbar's court who claims to be a lost royal relative. Ursula Le Guin reviewed it in The Guardian as "a sumptuous mixture of history with fable." In 2015, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights drew on the conflict surrounding the medieval scholar Ibn Rushd, the same figure from whom the family name derives. Le Guin wrote of that book: "Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story. Like her, he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril."

  Quichotte, a modern retelling of Don Quixote, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019. Victory City, Rushdie's fifteenth novel, was published in February 2023 and was the first major work released after the Chautauqua stabbing. A collection of five stories, The Eleventh Hour, was released in late 2025. His works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times in total, winning once, and he is frequently named a favourite candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His writing has so far produced more than 700 academic articles and 30 book-length studies. In April 2023, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.