Luka and The Fire Of Life

Knighted by Queen Elizabeth, named to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Sir Salman Rushdie is one of the foremost novelists of our time. Winner of the Booker Prize, the Best of the Bookers, and the Booker of Bookers, Rushdie ranks with the best writers of a generation. The author of sixteen previous books, Rushdie is best known for his second novel, Midnight’s Children, which launched him into fame, and The Satanic Verses, which touched off a storm of protest across the Muslim world and resulted in a fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. These two novels together helped shape two themes that have come together to give form to his career. On one hand, he nearly single-handedly defined the shape that Indian novels written in English would take for decades. And on the other he became a symbol of enlightenment and free speech, defiant against the forces of intolerance and fundamentalist religion. His books often tread a path that navigates these directions in his career. Fascinated both by the form of magic realism and the subject matter of post-colonialism, and by the experiences of various diasporas, Rushdie’s works have an uncanny ability to tease the story out of people’s sacred truths. An international celebrity, Rushdie is often in the public eye, whether the focus is on his personal life or his political views. He is also Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emory University, and Midnight’s Children has been adapted for a film version, to be shot by Canadian director Deepa Mehta.