Salman Rushdie, one of the most successful, controversial and celebrated novelists of his generation, will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday, March 2 for his presentation, "Step Across This Line: An Evening with Salman Rushdie." The 6 p.m. dinner event and discussion is restricted to CMC students, faculty, and staff only, with overflow seating on a first-come basis in McKenna Auditorium.
While on campus, Rushdie also will meet with students, including those in the short story class of Robert Faggen, the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature.
Rushdie's novels have won critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, while his ideas have stimulated, galvanized, and provoked. He is the author of such well-known books as Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, deemed sacrilegious by the late Ayatollah Khomeni, who issued a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989. Rushdie went on to produce some of his most compelling work while still under the death sentence, including The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
In 2004 Rushdie was named the president of the PEN American Center, the largest branch of PEN International the world's oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. As president, he has said he will continue to work to dispel national, ethnic, and racial hatreds, as well as advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship.
Rushdie's recent work, Shalimar the Clown: A Novel, was released in fall 2005 to widespread acclaim, including praise by The Wall Street Journal as a "timely novel that tells us something about Kashmir, a distant valley that has been thrown into the limelight for the wrong reasons. It is also an important book about the world we all live and die in." The Chicago Tribune regarded the author as "working once again at the top of his powers. The book deftly mixes dark comedy with high politics, sex and war and terror, romance and mythology a geopolitical love story with gusto and excitement."
Rushdie is the winner of numerous international literary prizes and awards including the Booker Prize and the "Booker of Bookers" award for Midnight's Children. His other honors include the Whitbread Novel Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.