Sir Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist, born in 1947. He is an alumnus of King's College, Cambridge, where he recalls playing croquet with E.M. Forster in the college garden.
For nearly half his life Rushdie has lived under sentence of death, after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini told Muslims it was their duty to murder him for writing "The Satanic Verses", a novel that allegedly insulted the Prophet Muhammad. In 2022, at a literary event, he was stabbed 15 times by Hadi Matar, a Lebanese-American with no prior criminal record. The attack cost Rushdie his right eye. Matar was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment in May 2025.
Rushdie has long insisted on the comic dimension of his work, a quality he feels has been overshadowed by the notoriety of the fatwa. His collection of short stories "The Eleventh Hour" (2025) satirises religious bigots, political charlatans and death itself. He regards writers as "the custodians of language" and has spoken of a "figurative world war of stories" in which incompatible versions of reality compete for dominance.
History, n.: Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.