NRI Salman Rushdie honored at PEN America gala,
his first in-person appearance since stabbing
Los Angeles, May 19,2023
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/ A.Gary Singh
Salman Rushdie made an emotional and unexpected return to public life Thursday night, attending the annual gala of PEN America and giving the event’s final speech as he accepted a special prize, the PEN Centenary Courage Award, just nine months being after being stabbed repeatedly and hospitalized.
“It’s nice to be back — as opposed to not being back, which was also a possibility. I’m glad the dice rolled this way,” Rushdie, 75, told hundreds gathered at the American Museum of Natural History, where he received a standing ovation.
It was his first in-person appearance at a public event since he was attacked last August while on stage at a literary festival in Western New York.
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NRI Salman Rushdie gives first interview
Since 2022 stabbing
Los Angeles, Feb 07,2023
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/ A.Gary Singh
NRI Salman Rushdie has spoken for the first time about being stabbed last year at an event in New York.
He subsequently lost vision in one eye. Salman has long faced death threats for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. In a wide-ranging interview with The New Yorker, Rushdie said:
- He was "lucky... my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude".
- "I've been better. But, considering what happened, I'm not so bad.
- "The big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half o`f the palm. I'm doing a lot of hand therapy, and I'm told that I'm doing very well."
- He said it was difficult to type and to write due to a lack of feeling in some of his fingertips.
- "I'm able to get up and walk around. When I say I'm fine, I mean, there are bits of my body that need constant check ups. It was a colossal attack."
- "There is such a thing as PTSD, you know," he said. "I've found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it's a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I'm not out of that forest yet, really."
The man suspected of stabbing Sir Salman, Hadi Matar, has been charged with attempted murder. Salman was forced into hiding for nearly 10 years after The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. Many Muslims reacted with fury to it, arguing that the portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad insulted their faith.
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NRI Salman Rushdie novelist, stabbed in neck
at New York
Los Angeles, Aug 12,2022
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/ A.Gary Singh
NRI British author Salman Rushdie, well known for his novel "The Satanic Verses," which hurted many Muslims and sparked death threats that forced him to live in hiding for nine years, was stabbed in the neck onstage at a lecture in New York state on Friday and airlifted to a hospital.
A man rushed to the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and attacked Rushdie, 75, as he was being introduced to give a talk on artistic freedom to an audience of hundreds, eyewitnesses said. A New York State Police trooper present at the event took the attacker into custody, police said.
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Salman Rushdie was married Padma Lakshmi,"Top Chef". Padma Lakshmi started her career as a model and has since acted in movies and television shows and written cookbooks. She hosts the U.S. cooking show "Top Chef" on the Bravo cable network. He was agreed to divorce Padma Lakshmi, because of her desire to end their marriage.
"Top Chef". Padma Lakshmi. …..READ MORE |
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Salman Rushdie Bio :
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, to a middle-class Moslem family. His paternal grandfather was an Urdu poet, and his father a Cambridge-educated businessman.
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At the age of fourteen Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England.
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In 1964 Rushdie's parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan, joining reluctantly the Muslim exodus - during these years there was a war between India and Pakistan, and the choosing of sides and divided loyalties burdened Rushdie heavily.
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Rushdie continued his studies at King's College, Cambridge, where he read history. After graduating in 1968 he worked for a time in television in Pakistan.
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He was an actor in a theatre group at the Oval House in Kennington and from 1971 to 1981 he worked intermittently as a freelance advertising copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather and Charles Barker.
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Anglo-Indian novelist, who uses in his works tales from various genres - fantasy, mythology, religion, oral tradition. Rushdie's narrative technique has connected his books to magic realism, which includes such English-language authors as Peter Carey, Angela Carter, E.L. Doctorow, John Fowles, Mark Helprin or Emma Tennant.
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Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the former Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989, after publishing SATANIC VERSES.
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Naguib Mahfouz, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, criticized Khomeini for 'intellectual terrorism' but changed his view later and said that Rushdie did not have 'the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.' The Nobel writer V.S. Naipaul described Khomeini's fatwa as "an extreme form of literary criticism."
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Rushdie became popular again when he was selected for knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth. From this news, Muslims in Iran and Pakistan became very angry again.
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In 1981, his second novel, "Midnight's Children," a magic-realist exploration of Indian history, won the Booker Prize.
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