ABSTRACT
No modern novelist has been obliged so painfully to bear witness to the ongoing power of narrative to upset and disturb those who resent its open-endedness as Salman Rushdie. Born in Bombay in 1947, the son of a prosperous Muslim businessman, Rushdie was sent for his education to England, where he attended Rugby and then read history at Cambridge. Rushdie was obliged to go into hiding under state protection for many years and, although the fatwa has now been lifted, his life remains affected by the impact of his book. In the course of his career Rushdie has had to bear a weight of responsibility for his imagined worlds unlike that of any other modern novelist. He has continued to use his fiction as a means by which to express his faith in the importance and regenerative power of stories and the imagination.
