FACTBOX of Salman Rushdie

FACTBOX-British writer Salman Rushdie

Sunday, Apr 20, 2008 <(Reuters) - British author Salman Rushdie, 60, says that time is running out, and with only a handful of books left in him he is choosing his subjects carefully.

His 10th novel, "The Enchantress of Florence", was published earlier this month.

Rushdie is best known for his novel "The Satanic Verses," which outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats that forced him to live in hiding for nine years.

Here are some facts about Rushdie:

* EARLY LIFE:

-- Salman Rushdie was born to Muslim parents in Mumbai (Bombay) in June 1947, two months before Indian independence led to the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state.

-- At 13 he was sent to Rugby, a private school in England. There he says he first encountered racism and was rejected by his peers despite his academic prowess. His essays were torn up and slogans were daubed on walls.

-- In 1965 he went to King's College, Cambridge to read history. After graduating, he went to Pakistan and lived with his family who had moved there in 1964. He worked briefly in television there before returning to Britain and working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, "Grimus", was published in 1975.

* FAME AND INFAMY:

-- Rushdie shot to fame in 1981 when his second novel, "Midnight's Children," a magical-realist exploration of Indian history, won the Booker Prize for Fiction. In 1993 the novel was judged to have been the "Booker of Bookers", the best novel to have won the prize in the award's 25-year history.

-- "The Satanic Verses", which won him worldwide notoriety when it appeared in 1988, is an allegorical fantasy about the struggle between good and evil, a surrealist journey by an Asian immigrant into an alien Western environment which questions the tenets of Islam.

-- Book burnings, riots across the Muslim world and calls for the novel to be banned culminated on February 14, 1989 in a death edict, or fatwa, proclaimed against Rushdie by Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who deemed the book blasphemous to Islam.

-- Rushdie went into hiding for nine years. In 1998 the Iranian government formally distanced itself from the death edict, but hardline groups in Iran regularly renew the call for his murder, saying Khomeini's fatwa is irrevocable.

* MORE CONTROVERSY:

-- In 2007 Britain awarded Rushdie a knighthood, defending its decision when some Muslims complained that honouring the author of "The Satanic Verses" was offensive to Islam.

-- The knighthood, for services to literature, prompted diplomatic protests from Pakistan and Iran and demonstrations in Pakistan and Malaysia.

* LATEST WORK:

-- His new novel, "The Enchantress of Florence", is an historical novel set in Renaissance Florence and the court of the Mughal Empire in India. It follows a woman trying to command her own destiny in a man's world. Rushdie's previous novel "Shalimar the Clown" was published in 2005.

Sources: Reuters/www.contemporarywriters.com

(Writing by David Cutler)

With clock ticking, Rushdie makes careful choices

Monday, Apr 21, 2008 By Mike Collett-White

LONDON (Reuters) - Author Salman Rushdie says time is running out, so with only a handful of books left in him he is choosing his subjects carefully.

Having just published his 10th novel, "The Enchantress of Florence", the 60-year-old plans to write a children's story next to keep a promise he made to his younger son Milan.

"I promised my younger son, who is just coming up to 11, that I would write another book for younger readers, because he read 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories' not so long ago and was very fond it," Rushdie told Reuters in a recent interview.

"But he's also well aware of the fact that it's written for his older brother, so he's now begun to say 'Where's my book?' and there's no answer to that except to write it. I had to do a deal with him to be allowed to write this book (Enchantress)."

Rushdie typically takes three to five years to write a book.

"You think 'How many more have I got?' And so the question of which ones ... becomes unusually important when you are no longer immortal.

"When you are 25 you think you can do anything, loads of time, and now there isn't loads of time. Fortunately, I think one of the things you get better at as a writer as you get older is subject selection."

Another advantage of advancing years and a focussed mind, Rushdie believes, is that criticism becomes easier to bear.

"It's always nicer when people get it and like it than when they don't get it and don't like it. But you reach a point ... when you realise how many good working years you've got left?

"When you are asking yourself those questions, which are life and death questions, what a given critic says of you is a very minor thing compared to that.

"I think when you're younger you can actually be deflected by criticism. It can actually get in your way."

ATTACKED FROM ALL SIDES

What did upset Rushdie was attacks from the "non-Muslim" community in Britain after he was awarded a knighthood last year, which he described as "a carnival of hate".

Politicians in Iran, Pakistan and other Muslim countries criticised Britain's decision to honour the writer who, 20 years ago, sparked fury with his novel "The Satanic Verses" which was deemed to have blasphemed against Islam.

While Rushdie expected such a reaction, which soon petered out, he added: "I did get surprised by the extent to which non-Muslim criticism in this country seemed to use it as a moment to really have a go at me.

"Suddenly it seemed like everybody who had ever had something against me was able to get acres of space in the newspapers to say what a bastard I was, and that my books were lousy and why didn't you give the knighthood to the postman because he wrote better than I did."

The Indian-born writer feels he is judged for what people think he is, not what he writes, the result of fame bordering on celebrity due to nine years in hiding after a death sentence was issued in 1989 by the then supreme religious leader of Iran.

"My general plan at the moment is to simplify my life," he said. "Again that is a sense of the clock ticking. You want to get done things you want to get done and in my mind that's mostly family, work, friends."

(Editing by Giles Elgood)