Sam Leith has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Salman Rushdie has long hated and struggled against the idea that the 1989 fatwa pronounced on him after the publication of The Satanic Verses should define his career or his life. It was, as he frequently pointed out, a book he published only a quarter of the way through his career. He wanted the life of a writer, and for his books – even ‘that book’ – to be read as books rather than as footnotes to an episode in his biography or tokens in some pre-digital culture wars.
Two nights before the reading, Rushdie dreamt he was attacked by a man with a spear in a Roman amphitheatre
He thought he had managed that. The only people who ever asked him about the fatwa, he told me when we met in 2020, were journalists: ‘to be dragged back into the late 1980s is boring.’
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