From the Faith and Reason series on PBS:
Salman Rushdie is a celebrated novelist, short-story writer, and essayist who gained international notoriety in 1989 when Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini demanded his execution for his portrayal of the prophet Mohammed in the novel THE SATANIC VERSES.
Born into a Muslim family in Bombay, India, in 1947, Rushdie began his writing career in the mid-1970s, after settling in England. His second novel, MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, an allegory of post-independence Indian society, catapulted him to fame in 1981 and was awarded Britain’s Booker Prize for best novel. In 1993, the novel was named the “Booker of Bookers,” as the best novel to receive the award in the prize’s 25-year history.
Rushdie followed MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN with a string of seven highly acclaimed novels, among them THE SATANIC VERSES (1988), THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH (1995) and THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET (1999). Most of the author’s novels are set on the Indian subcontinent and focus on actual political and historical events interwoven with myth, fantasy, and folklore – a technique that has drawn comparisons to the “magic realism” of South American writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Read more and watch the video here. [Thanks to Zaneb Beams.]