Satirizing With Salman
Featuring Sir Salman Rushdie
Novelist, Essayist
October 11, 2016
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The story
Salman Rushdie is the author of twelve novels. His books have been translated into over forty languages and have received a long list of recognition, including the Booker Prize. Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker – the best winner in the award’s 40 year history – by a public vote. He has received the Freedom of the City in Mexico City, Strasbourg and El Paso, and the Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union. He holds the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres – France’s highest artistic honour.
Fun facts
Salman was born in Bombay, then British India, into a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent.
He would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies. He’s managed to accomplish the dream through frequent cameo appearances.
In 1999 he had an operation to correct ptosis, a tendon condition that causes drooping eyelids. According to him, that was making it increasingly difficult to open his eyes.
At one point he was strongly favoured to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature but the organisers were later quoted as saying that he would have been “too predictable, too popular.”
He is a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase (“free speech is life itself”) from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the US Constitution.
He cheers for the English football club Tottenham Hotspur.
He worked as a copywriter for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he coined lines for the likes of Aero chocolate bars and American Express.
In 2007 he was knighted for services to literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Although he came from a liberal Muslim family, he now identifies as an atheist.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in which the Orpheus myth winds through a story set in the world of rock music, was turned into a song by U2.