Smash hit

What the critics said:

ANITA DESAI
Washington Post Book World, March 1981
Since the subject of Salman Rushdie’s novel is the progress of the political juggernaut through the Indian subcontinent — the juggernaut being literally a religious procession taken through the land in celebration, although said to leave behind a wake of destruction — one might expect a dark and sombre treatise. It is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Midnight's Children burgeons with life, with exuberance and fantasy. It has the same effect on the eyes and the ears as a magnificent circus performance — a scene that is brilliant with colour, zest, daredevilry and loud bravado. The language is as full and copious as a flood or fire of tremendous proportions.

ELAINE FEINSTEIN
The Times, April 1981
The book is witty as well as strange, with pungent dialogue as well as confusing superstitions; and I haven’t been so continuously surprised by a novel since I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Salman Rushdie, then and now

1947 Born in Bombay. Went to Rugby School in Warwickshire.

1965 Attends King’s College, Cambridge, where he read history.

1975 Publishes his first novel, Grimus

1981 Midnight’s Children is published to critical acclaim, winning the Booker Prize.

1988 The Satanic Verses is published in the UK.

1989 Many Muslims are upset by the irreverent fictional version of the prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses. The Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran, issues a fatwa — effectively a death sentence — against all those involved with the book. Rushdie receives protection from the British Government. Copies of the book are burned in Bradford.

1991 Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses is stabbed to death; Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, is wounded.

1993 Midnight’s Children wins ‘The Booker’s Booker’ for best winner in the prize’s 25 years.

2001 Fury, a novel set in New York, receives mixed reviews. “The magic has gone,” The Times laments.

2005 His latest novel Shalimar the Clown is shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award.

2006 The 25th anniversary of Midnight’s Children. Although the fatwa was officially lifted in 1998, the Iranian Martyrs Foundation has announced that it still stands. Salman Rushdie, then and now.

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