Renowned author Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times onstage at a literary event on Friday morning. He is currently on a ventilator after suffering serious injuries at the hands of the attacker and is likely to lose an eye. Leaders from across the world, including Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron, have condemned the attack on Salman Rushdie.
Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest storytellers of our times. He has captured the imagination of his readers beautifully, but he is also an author, who has stirred controversy several times with his writing.
Rushdie has received numerous honours over the years among which are the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), the Writers’ Guild Award, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year Prizes in both Britain and Germany, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Crossword Book Award in India, and many more. He is also part of the British Royal Society of Literature.
Let’s take a look one of his best works ‘Midnight’s Children’.
Salman Rushdie took five years to write his second novel, which earned him international recognition. ‘Midnight’s Children’ chronicles India’s transition from British colonial rule to Independence and partition. It won the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. The book was awarded “The Best of the Booker" in 2008 and was adapted into a movie by filmmaker Deepa Mehta in 2012.
In an article in The Guardian, the author talked about his book and said that when he wrote the book, he could associate with the character of Saleem Sinia who connected with god Ganesha, despite not being a Hindu. He said that he had in mind an arc of history moving from the hope – the bloodied hope, but still the hope – of independence to the betrayal of that hope in the so-called Emergency, followed by the birth of a new hope.
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