What twists of fate made him evil incarnate? He sets out his prime motif: The question that’s asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it’s born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul. On his way he meets him - the poor man trying to forget his own roots and desperately reinventing himself, his Iago. He painted Othello as an Indian actor, worshiped and adored and off on a mad canter to get his Ice Queen, his Desdemona. And because you show the growth, it can no longer be a tragedy, no, no it has to be a comedy. He loved him too much to believe the simple explanation.Īnd then the idea starts growing on him - to explore the growth of evil just as Shakespeare showed, explored the tragic culmination of it. What could cause such evil to manifest, he just could not figure. The unsaid hate, the unseen events, the half-imagined wrongs they tormented him. He had just finished his thirty-fourth reading of the play. In 2007, he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University.

In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for 'services to literature', which 'thrilled and humbled' him. Faced with death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, which called for him to be killed, he spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically. His fourth novel led to some violent protests from Muslims in several countries. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world. Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, a novelist and essayist, set much of his early fiction at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. The Satanic Verses (1988), novel of Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie led Ruholla Khomeini, the ayatollah of Iran, to demand his execution and then forced him into hiding his other works include Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker prize, and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995).

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie