Salman Rushdie: stories shaped by migration and memory

Salman Rushdie’s fiction moves between India, Britain and the wider world, joining the scale of history to the lives of individuals caught up in it. His breakthrough novel, Midnight’s Children, made a boy’s birth coincide with India’s independence. Later, The Satanic Verses brought a novel about migration, faith and identity into a fierce international dispute over religion and artistic freedom. Rushdie’s life and work have been shaped by movement between countries, but his literary career has also become part of Britain’s story: he arrived in England as a schoolboy, studied at Cambridge and went on to write some of the most widely discussed novels in English.

From Bombay to Cambridge

Rushdie was born Ahmed Salman Rushdie in Bombay, British India, on 19 June 1947, to Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a lawyer who became a businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher. He was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay. In 1961, aged 14, he moved to England and attended Rugby School. He later studied history at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1968.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Rushdie worked in advertising. At Ogilvy & Mather he devised the word “irresistibubble” for Aero; at Ayer Barker, he wrote “That’ll do nicely” for American Express. He was still working in advertising when he wrote Midnight’s Children. That combination of commercial work and literary ambition makes for a less solitary account of a writing career than the familiar image of the novelist at a desk: the book that established his reputation took shape alongside a job writing for clients.

His first novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975 and received little public or critical attention. His second, Midnight’s Children, published in 1981, was a decisive change in fortune. Saleem Sinai is born at the moment India becomes independent, and the novel links his life to the upheavals of the new nation. Its mixture of fantastical elements and historical fiction gave Rushdie a form through which to make the past intimate, political and unstable. It won the Booker Prize in 1981 and later received the special prizes Best of the Booker and Booker of Bookers, in 1993 and 2008 respectively.

Fiction across borders

Rushdie’s next novel, Shame (1983), turned to political turmoil in Pakistan. His writing repeatedly returns to the complications of belonging: migration, inherited histories and the ties that bind people to places they may have left. The 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, a family saga spanning about a century of Indian history, won the Whitbread Award. Shalimar the Clown (2005), set between Kashmir and Los Angeles, explores love and betrayal across those different worlds.

His work is not confined to sprawling historical novels. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) is a children’s book about storytelling and silence, written in the shadow of the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses. He later returned to Haroun’s world in Luka and the Fire of Life (2010). His other writing includes the short-story collection East, West (1994), the essays collected in Step Across This Line (2002) and Languages of Truth (2021), and the memoirs Joseph Anton (2012) and Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024). Victory City, published in 2023, was his first novel released after the 2022 attack in which he was severely injured.

The range of these books shows a writer returning to questions of how stories are made, inherited and challenged. His fiction often combines magical realism with historical material, but the effect is not an escape from politics: the fantastical can make the pressures of history more visible. His writing has also travelled beyond the novel. In 1987 he published The Jaguar Smile, a non-fiction account of Nicaragua; in 1992, he wrote a study of The Wizard of Oz for the British Film Institute.

The Satanic Verses and its consequences

Published in 1988, The Satanic Verses uses satire and dream sequences to address faith, doubt, identity and the experience of migration. Its depiction of religious material was seen by some as irreverent and provoked protests. On 14 February 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The controversy became a sustained threat to the author’s safety and a worldwide argument about religious offence, censorship and the freedom to write fiction.

Rushdie lived under police protection for several years. The threat did not remain a matter of public debate alone: people associated with translating or publishing the novel were attacked. In 1991, its Italian translator was stabbed and survived; days later, its Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death. In 1993, Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and survived. Those events give the dispute a human cost that should not be obscured by treating it simply as a controversy over a book.

Rushdie’s response included writing about the years following the fatwa. In Joseph Anton, he used the alias he had been given during the period of protection as the title for his account. His defence of expression also took public and organisational forms. He was president of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founded the PEN World Voices Festival. In 2005, he opposed the British government’s proposed Racial and Religious Hatred Act, contributing to the collection Free Expression Is No Offence. These activities connect his arguments about the freedom to write with a British legislative debate as well as with the international controversy around his own novel.

A career recognised in Britain

Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and was knighted for services to literature in 2007. He was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2022 for services to literature. These honours sit alongside the prizes for his writing, including the Booker and Whitbread awards. The range of recognition reflects not only one celebrated novel but a career spanning fiction, essays, memoir and children’s literature.

His life and work also extend well beyond Britain. He became a US citizen in 2016 and has lived in the United States since 2000. He taught at Emory University and held academic appointments in the United States, including as Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. In 2022, while preparing to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, he was stabbed. He survived, but lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand. In Knife, published in 2024, he wrote about the attack and his recovery.

Why Salman Rushdie deserves a place in British Legacy

Rushdie’s place in British literary history rests on more than his birth in India or the international reputation of his books. He moved to England as a teenager, was educated at Rugby and Cambridge, and built a writing career in a country whose literary traditions and public arguments form part of his story. He also addressed a specifically British debate about legislation on religious hatred, arguing for the importance of freedom of expression. Those connections make his work relevant to British readers without reducing it to a single national label: his novels are shaped by migration and by the movement of histories and identities between countries.

His achievement is also visible in the way his books join imaginative form to historical and political questions. Midnight’s Children made a personal life a way into the history of independence and its aftermath; The Satanic Verses brought the tensions around migration, faith and fiction into public view. The threats and attacks that followed the latter book underline why debates about literary freedom can have consequences beyond criticism or sales. Rushdie’s writing, public advocacy and memoirs keep those questions in view. Together, they give British Legacy a subject whose work links British education and public life to a wider, complicated literary world.

Sources

Salman Rushdie — Wikipedia, revision 1378654889

Adapted in part from Salman Rushdie by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.