A Page in the Life: Salman Rushdie

It’s a bright, sunny afternoon at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan and Salman Rushdie is being awfully game. A new exhibition dedicated to The Wizard of Oz has just opened, and toddlers are running around, waving wands and bashing exhibits. “I’m sure you’re used to this kind of thing,” says the photographer. “Surprisingly enough, I’ve not been photographed with a talking tree before.”

Still, it’s a fitting place to meet Rushdie. After all, he once wrote a study of the 1939 MGM film whose song Over the Rainbow he called “a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn – the hymn – to elsewhere”. In other words, a grand paean to many of the themes dramatised in his own continent-hopping, migratory fictions. Buoyed by flights of surrealism and fantasy, jangling with wordplay, his writing has often been described as magical realism; it is just as useful, though, to think of it as a species of children’s literature.

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