Salman Rushdie (Oxford Companion)

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature:

Rushdie, [Ahmed] Salman, (1947-), novelist and short story writer, born in Bombay to a Muslim family, educated at the Cathedral School, Rugby, and King's College, Cambridge. 

He worked for a time in television in Pakistan, as an actor in London, and as an advertising copywriter. Rushdie's bicultural upbringing informs all his work. He draws on the allegorical fable-making traditions of both East and West and is often classed amongst the exponents of magic realism—the narrative style in which the realistic mingles with the fantastic and the inexplicable. 

His first novel, Grimus (1975), was a fantasy based on a medieval Sufi poem and was followed by Midnight's Children (1981), the book that brought him to literary prominence and which won the Booker Prize. It tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on the day India was granted independence and whose life becomes emblematic of the political and social destiny of the new nation. 

In Shame (1983) the subject is Pakistan, the struggle between military and civilian rule, and the culture of shame and honour which oppresses women; the historical figures wear satirical and allegorical disguise, but the narrative is interrupted by direct autobiographical interventions from the author.  

The Satanic Verses (1988) is a jet-propelled panoramic novel shich moves with dizzying speed from the streets and film studios of Bombay to multicultural Britain, from Argentina to Mount Everest, as Rushdie questions illusion, reality, and the power of faith and tradition in a world of hijackings, religious pilgrimages and warfare, and celluloid fantasy. Certain passages were interpreted by some Muslims as blasphemous and brought upon Rushdie the notorious sentence of death, or fatwa, invoked by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989, which obliged him to seek police protection. 

Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a novel for children about a boy-hero who has to combat the enemy of storytelling, Prince Kahttam-Shud, was published in 1990 (adapted for the stage at the National Theatre, 1998), and Imaginary Homelands, a collection of critical journalism and interviews, in 1991. 

In 1994 Rushdie published his first collection of short stories, East, West, which, written on the cultural cusp between two traditions, also confronts the  conflicting claims of the real and the imagined. The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) is a dense and exuberant study of cultural and personal inheritance narrated in the first person by Moraes Zogoiby—the 'Moor' of the title—who ages at twice the normal rate.