Biographie

Sentenced to death in 1989 for his book "The Satanic Verses" by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed the book to be an insult to the Islamic religion. He has lived under police protection ever since. Since the Ayatollah's death, he has become a slightly more public person.

Helped pick the phrase "naughty but nice" as an advertising slogan to sell cakes in 1970s Britain.

He was awarded a Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 2007 Queen Elizabeth II's Birthday Honors List for his services to Literature.

His book "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" was written for his son Zafar while he was in hiding, and they could not meet.

According to the memoir "Joseph Anton", Keith Vaz MP promised Rushdie support over the phone, and then supported a protest against him.

I still refuse to call it 'Mumbai', as do many people who live there. It's not ancient like Delhi, with thousands of years of history. Essentially it's a city the British built because they thought the natural harbour would be useful to the navy. They reclaimed land to join together seven islands into what is now the peninsula of south Bombay, then they built a fort and the city grew around it.

You can't be elected dog-catcher in America unless you're a Christian. For someone like me who spent a lot of his adult life in England and western Europe,it's probably the biggest single difference between the United States and the rest of the western democracies.

Education changes the world. If you have generations of children being brought up in extremist madrasas to believe that that world view is the correct world view, then you create generations of people with built-in hostilities. Even if nothing had happened to exacerbate those hostilities, even if there had not been an Iraq war, the mindset of generations, particularly of young men, has been badly affected. You see that anti-semitism is taken for granted, and that a highly misogynistic world view is propagated, where the role of women is cast as secondary. And when you get to other issues like the treatment of religious minorities or sexual minorities, there's a fantastic hostility. So you're bringing up generations of bigoted children.

[on a forced shutdown in Sri Lanka during the filming of 'Midnight's Children'] We lost two day's shooting and a lot of sleep. It's clear that there was somebody in the Iranian foreign ministry - I don't know who, and I don't know at how high a level it was, but someone - said to the Sri Lankan ambassador they they disapproved of the permission having been given [to film] and that it should be revoked. Fortunately Deepa [Mehta] as part of the process of planning the film, had personally been to see the president of Sri Lanka [as a project for]trying to develop the film industry in Sri Lanka, develop it as a location for filming, and that they saw this as being a kind of showcase for that. So they were very supportive of it.. The moment we got to the president's office he said, 'No,of course you must make your film'.

[on how he managed to weather the storm over 'Satanic Verses'] Just by being bloody-minded. I think I'm tougher than I thought I was. One of the things...was that I just wanted to be myself... to keep writing books I wanted to write. I think, if you knew nothing about my life story, if you'd never seen anything about my life and all you had was my books to look at, there isn't a great rift in 1989. It's not that writing after that is radically different in the writing before that. I think [it] has its own continuity, and I've tried very hard to do that.