Do you agree with the selection? Click here and post your comments

Salman Rushdie has changed so much about the way we read and write fiction that it is almost impossible to imagine a postwar literary world without him. He burst on to the scene in 1981 (after a false start as a science fiction writer) when the dazzling Booker winner Midnight’s Children announced the arrival of a new Anglo-Indian voice, whose vision of the post-colonial subcontinent transcended the old dichotomy of “the open sewer and the whispering glade”. During the fatwa for blasphemy after The Satanic Verses, fellow writers-in-exile supported Rushdie, and despite his own sense that “for many people, I’ve ceased to be a human being. I’ve become an issue, a bother, an ‘affair’ ”, his sharp tongue and wit never left him. Nor did his desire to keep telling some of the tallest and wildest tales of our global age.

One to read: Midnight’s Children (1981)

More about Salman Rushdie

Briefing: the origins of the Rushdie controversy

The Rushdie knighthood: 10 questions

My week by Hugo Rifkind

Watch Rushdie reading from The Satanic Verses

See the full top 50 list here

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Sarah Palin and the Palindromes: 7 extraordinary connections
• Physics for Future Presidents: The Podcasts
• 10 Books Not To Read Before You Die