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SALMAN RUSHDIE (B. 1947) Salman Rushdie was raised in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and migrated to Britain in 1961. In 1968 he graduated from Kings College, Cambridge, where he read History, and he was initially employed as an advertising copywriter. His first novel, Grimus (1975), was a critical and commercial flop; his next, Midnight’s Children (1981), earned him international admiration. His subsequent novels are Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001) and Shalimar the Clown (2005). The publication of The Satanic Verses became a notorious international incident. Initially denounced by the Muslim community of Bradford, UK, as a work of blasphemy, the novel came to be banned in South Africa, India and Pakistan. On 14 February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s spiritual leader, decreed a fatwa which effectively sentenced Rushdie to death for blasphemy. Rushdie spent many years in hiding, and today lives in New York City. His work is characterized by an exhaustingly energetic, culturally kaleidoscopic and formally imaginative literary style, which expresses something of Rushdie’s hybridizing experiences as a migrant writer who moves between cultures, continents and languages. A lover of cities, he has written dynamically about the Bombay of his birth, London and New York City; while he remains a staunch critic of the political failures of the South Asian subcontinent since decolonization and Partition, and (as in Shalimar the Clown) has written powerfully about the threat of global terrorism which has dogged his life since 1989 and has since come to define the new world order of the twenty-first century.