Salmon Rushdie Biography

Rushdie emigrated to Britain in 1965 and studied at Cambridge. He worked as an actor and an advertising copywriter before becoming a writer, producing his first novel, ‘Grimus’, in 1975. His 1988 book, ‘Satanic Verses’, caused worldwide controversy because of its treatment of Islam from a secular point of view, and in 1989 he was forced to go into hiding because of a sentence of death (fatwa) passed on him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for blasphemy. The fatwa was officially lifted in 1998.