Salman Rushdie

Rushdie was born in Bombay and sent to boarding school in England as a teenager, an early rupture between subcontinent and empire that runs through everything he later wrote. He worked in advertising, writing copy by day, before Midnight's Children (1981), the saga of children born at the stroke of independence, telepathically linked to the fate of the new nation, won the Booker Prize and, years later, the 'Booker of Bookers' as the best winner in the prize's first quarter-century.

The Satanic Verses (1988) provoked Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa calling for his death over its treatment of Islam, forcing Rushdie into hiding under British police protection for nearly a decade, moving between safe houses under the pseudonym Joseph Anton. He gradually returned to public life once the threat receded, continuing to publish widely.

In 2022 he was stabbed repeatedly on a public stage in New York, losing sight in one eye, and wrote of the attack in the memoir Knife rather than retreating from public writing again.