Salman Rushdie, the novelist who answered a death sentence with more stories

Salman Rushdie

Photo: Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 19, 1947 Bombay (now Mumbai), British India
Occupation	Novelist
Known for	Bridget Jones's Diary, Then She Found Me, Orwell: 2+2=5
Awards	Booker Prize · Booker of Bookers · Best of the Booker · Whitbread Novel · Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger · Austrian State Prize · Hutch Crossword Book · Hans Christian Andersen Literature · PEN Pinter Prize · Peace Prize of the German Book Trade · National Book Foundation Medal

On November 18, 2026, at the 77th National Book Awards in New York, Salman Rushdie will receive the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Announcing the honor, the foundation’s chair, David Steinberger, called him “a bold, innovative writer and an indefatigable defender of free speech.” Both halves of that sentence have cost Rushdie something. Four years after a man rushed a lecture stage in western New York and stabbed him, the author of Midnight’s Children is not taking a quiet lap of honor. He opened Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas in August, and his most recent book, the story collection The Eleventh Hour, circles the subject he now knows better than almost any living novelist: the late hour when everything shifts.

Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947, in Bombay, two months before Indian independence, into a Kashmiri Muslim family. His father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge-educated lawyer turned businessman, had taken the surname in honor of the medieval philosopher Ibn Rushd. The boy read “mountains” of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, and Rushdie later credited a film, The Wizard of Oz, with making him a writer. He left for England in 1961 to attend Rugby School, then read history at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1968.

His debut, the science-fiction fable Grimus (1975), was largely ignored. His second novel was not. Midnight’s Children (1981) follows Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight as India becomes independent and telepathically bound to the other children born in that hour. It won the 1981 Booker Prize, then the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008. V. S. Pritchett compared its storytelling to Gabriel García Márquez‘s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the novel gave magical realism a subcontinental accent: comic, digressive, crowded with history. Shame (1983), a dark fable about power in Pakistan, was shortlisted for the Booker and won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.

Then came The Satanic Verses (1988). The novel won the Whitbread Award, but on February 14, 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for its author’s death over its perceived depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. The book was banned in 20 countries. Rushdie went into hiding under police protection, using the alias Joseph Anton. In 1991 the novel’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death; its Italian translator and Norwegian publisher survived attacks. Writers rallied around him. Umberto Eco’s message was the driest: “A death sentence is a rather harsh review.”

He kept writing. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), composed for his son Zafar, is a children’s adventure and an allegorical defense of stories against silence. The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), a family saga spanning a century of Indian history, won the Whitbread and reached another Booker shortlist. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) recast Orpheus and Eurydice as rock stars, and one of its lyrics became a U2 song. After moving to New York in 2000, he wrote Fury (2001) and Shalimar the Clown (2005), a story of love and betrayal between Kashmir and Los Angeles that critics hailed as a return to form and that won the Hutch Crossword Book Award. He was knighted in 2007. Ursula K. Le Guin praised The Enchantress of Florence (2008), set partly at the Mughal court of Akbar, as a “sumptuous mixture of history with fable.”

The memoir Joseph Anton (2012) finally told the hiding years in his own words. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), whose title adds up to a thousand and one nights, unleashed a war of jinns on modern New York; Le Guin called him “our Scheherazade.” The Golden House (2017) satirized contemporary America, and Quichotte (2019), a modern retelling of Cervantes, gave him a fifth Booker shortlisting. He became an American citizen in 2016 and, in 2021, married the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

On August 12, 2022, as he was about to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State, a 24-year-old attacker stabbed him repeatedly in the face, neck and abdomen. Rushdie survived, but lost the sight in his right eye and suffered damage to his liver and a hand. The novel he had already finished, Victory City, about a woman who conjures a fantastical empire into being, appeared in February 2023. A year later came Knife (2024), his account of the attack and recovery, in which he holds imagined conversations with his assailant, whom he names only “A.” It topped the Sunday Times hardback list in its category and was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Recent honors include his appointment as a Companion of Honour in 2022 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2023.

The Eleventh Hour (2025), his first fiction since the attack, gathers five stories that move between India, England and America: two quarrelsome old men in “In the South,” a musical prodigy with destructive gifts in “The Musician of Kahani,” the ghost of a Cambridge don seeking revenge in “Late,” a writer investigating his mentor’s apparent death in “Oklahoma,” and a parable about free speech in “The Old Man in the Piazza.” Publishers Weekly called it “a marvelous story collection focused on themes of legacy and death”; Kirkus described “a brilliant series of intimations of mortality.”

Rushdie’s books have travelled beyond the page, too: he co-wrote the screenplay for Deepa Mehta’s 2012 film of Midnight’s Children. But his larger legacy is an argument he has made for half a century, in fiction and out of it. “When you can’t retell for yourself the stories of your life,” he said in 2006, “then you live in a prison.” At 79, with one eye and an undiminished appetite for invention, he is still retelling them.

Tags: novelists, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Salman Rushdie, magical realism, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Midnight's Children