Salman Rushdie to release first fiction since stabbing
Acclaimed author Sir Salman Rushdie is set to release his first work of fiction in nearly three years, following a stabbing that left him blind in one eye in 2022.The Eleventh Hour will consist of a collection of stories from around the world, set across India, England and the US. The work will be published by Vintage, part of Penguin Random House, on 4 November - more than three years after he was stabbed while on stage by an assailant who was convicted last month of attempted murder and assault."Salman Rushdie's new fiction moves between the places he has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left," the publisher said.
According to Penguin Random House, the book depicts the story of "two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, who experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity".For readers familiar with Sir Salman's Midnight's Children, for which he won the Booker Prize, this upcoming work revisits the Bombay neighbourhood of that book, where "a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire". Sir Salman said the book is made up of three novellas - short stories - all of which were written in the last 12 months.The stories explore themes and places present in his mind, the author added, highlighting "mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America, and Goya and Kafka and Bosch".News of his latest work comes a year after Sir Salman released an autobiographical account of what happened when he was stabbed on stage during an event at the Chautauqua Institution.Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder explored Sir Salman's account of the attack, when he was stabbed more than a dozen times by Hadi Matar, 27.As well as vision loss in one eye, the attack in August 2022 left Sir Salman with other severe injuries, including damage to his liver and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his arm.In February, Matar was found guilty of his attempted murder and assault and now faces a sentence of more than 30 years in prison.Sir Salman testified during the trial. Recalling the incident, he said he was struck by the assailant's eyes, "which were dark and seemed very ferocious".He initially thought he had been punched, before realising he had been stabbed.
The 77-year-old previously spent several years in hiding after the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses - a fictional story inspired by the life of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad - triggered threats against his life.The surrealist, post-modern novel sparked outrage among some Muslims, who considered its content to be blasphemous - insulting to a religion or god - and was banned in some countries.A year after the book's release, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for Sir Salman's execution. He offered a $3m (£2.5m) reward in a fatwa - a legal decree issued by an Islamic religious leader.The British-Indian author has released as many as 16 novels, including Midnight's Children, for which he won the Booker Prize.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘I'm here to open doors': Bernardine Evaristo on success, controversy and why she plans to donate her £100k award
Back in 2013, Bernardine Evaristo gave a reading in a south London bookshop from her novel Mr Loverman. Only six people showed up, a couple of them were dozing and she realised they were homeless people who had come to find somewhere comfortable to sleep. Last month, the hit TV adaptation Mr Loverman, about a 74-year-old gay Caribbean man set in Hackney, east London, won two Baftas, including leading actor for Lennie James, making him the first Black British actor to win the TV award in its 70-year history. 'I checked Wikipedia!' Evaristo exclaims of this shocking fact when we meet in London. Evaristo's long career is one of firsts and creating them for others. In 2019, at the age of 60, she became the first Black woman to win the Booker prize – shared with Margaret Atwood – for Girl, Woman, Other, 12 interwoven stories of Black, female and one non-binary character. She is also the first Black woman to become president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) – only the second woman in its 200-year history, not to mention the first not to have attended Oxford, Cambridge or Eton. And this week she became the recipient of the Women's prize inaugural Outstanding Contribution award. 'I became an 'overnight success',' she writes of her Booker win in her 2021 memoir, Manifesto, 'after 40 years working professionally in the arts.' It is these now 45 years that are being recognised by this new award. Ironically, she has never won the Women's prize, although she was shortlisted for Girl, Woman, Other. 'This award more than makes up for it,' she beams. The Booker judges' decision to break the rules and split the prize between Evaristo and Atwood caused an outcry, with many accusing the panel of undermining the historic recognition of a Black female novelist. Evaristo was cheerfully unperturbed. 'It couldn't have gone better for me, to be honest,' she insists now. 'I really do mean that. In terms of how it accelerated my career and gave me so many more opportunities and such a large audience for my work.' Girl, Woman, Other was on the bestseller list for nine consecutive weeks. Barack Obama chose it as one of his favourite books of 2019. Hamish Hamilton reissued her backlist. After being told for decades that there was no market for her work, she was suddenly in demand. So much so that a 2021 Private Eye cartoon – now on her fridge – showed a guy exclaiming: 'Come quick! Bernardine Evaristo isn't on Radio 4!' Although she found it funny, there is an unmistakeable whiff of condescension. 'Why notice me?' she asks. 'When there are many people who are constantly in the media, who are not Black women. You notice the Black woman and suddenly it's too much. You want us to be quiet and invisible.' Tall and good-naturedly open, Evaristo is in no danger of keeping quiet or becoming invisible. Today she is wearing a hot-pink blouse the same shade as the trouser suit she wore to the Booker ceremony, her curls kept in check by a colourful headscarf. She is interested in power, how those outside the establishment can succeed without abandoning their own identities. 'The headline is going to be 'I want power!'' she hoots, as one not unfamiliar with controversy (the traditionally sleepy RSL has had more than its share of headlines under her tenure). 'What do we mean when we say power?' she says seriously. 'Influence, to have an impact, to effect change, to assume leadership positions? It's so important that power is shared out.' Unlike the late poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who rejected an OBE, Evaristo accepted hers in 2020, arguing that not to do so is to risk enforcing the idea of 'white honours for white British people'. How does it feel to be at the heart of the establishment, to no longer be 'throwing stones at the fortress', as she puts it in Manifesto? 'I still believe in what I believe in. I'm just much more capable and careful, hopefully strategic and able to have more of an impact than I did when I was in my 20s,' she says, reminding me that she has been professor of creative writing at Brunel University for many years now. 'You go through an angry period – as you get older you can't keep that up – but I'm still very alert to the inequality in the world, and also inequality in my industry. I am not there to endorse the status quo. I'm there to bring other people with me and to open the doors, always, to great talent.' She has not just opened doors but built them where none existed. From the moment she graduated from Rose Bruford drama school in 1982 and co-founded the Theatre of Black Women with fellow students, the playwright Patricia Hilaire and director Paulette Randall, she has set about making things happen. Those early days were not just about creating theatre, she says now, but also work. 'Because we were just so unemployable as Black women.' They put on Jackie Kay's first play Chiaroscuro in 1986. Since then, Evaristo has set up projects, mentoring schemes and prizes for under-represented poets and novelists. She has run workshops and courses, sat on judging panels (47, by her last count) and boards ('not something I necessarily want to do, trust me!'). Most recently, she launched the Black Britain: Writing Back series with her long-term publisher Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton, republishing 13 books by writers of colour since 1900. She plans to donate all her 'huge' prize money (£100,000) from this latest award to an as yet undisclosed project to support other writers. She hasn't done all this because she is 'saintly. Clearly not!' she laughs. Throughout our conversation, she is at pains not to sound like a 'do-gooder': we are here to talk about her outstanding contribution, I remind her. 'If I'm asked to do something, I need to accept the invitation, so that I can make a difference,' she explains. 'It is very important for me as a Black, British, working-class, now-older woman to acknowledge that really important position.' The fourth of eight siblings, Evaristo grew up in 'an activist household', she says. Her Nigerian father was a welder who became a local Labour councillor, her mother, a devout Catholic from an Irish family, was a primary school teacher and trade union rep. Evaristo's childhood in Woolwich, south-east London, in the 1960s was one of racial insults and smashed windows. Her father kept a hammer at the side of the bed for his whole life in England. The young Bernardine developed a 'self-protective force field' that persists to this day, along with a determination to fight her corner – with words. After leaving home for drama school at 18, her 20s were spent in a blaze of cigarettes and love affairs – with women – hustling for jobs and moving between the various short-term housing available in the 80s. 'I really cherish that period,' she says. She has been straight for 35 years, and today lives with her husband in the outskirts of west London; she has swapped the Marlboro Reds and Drambuie for yoga and meditation. In her 30s, before the boom in creative writing courses, she signed up for a personal development course. 'My parents were not part of the elite,' she explains. 'So they weren't going to pass on to me strategies for how to succeed.' Evaristo was manifesting long before Instagram promised us we could live our best lives. The course made her realise 'you can change big and you can expect the best. So why not go for that?' she says. She wrote a note to herself that she would win the Booker prize one day. The next three decades were spent working really hard to make it happen. 'Nobody was waiting for me to publish books. Nobody was commissioning me,' she has said in a radio interview. 'I just wrote on spec and hoped that somebody would publish me.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Her first poetry collection, Island of Abraham, was published in 1994. Lara, a verse-novel based on her parents' marriage, came out three years later. Then came The Emperor's Babe, another verse-novel and her first with Penguin, which imagines life for a Black girl in Roman London. Soul Tourists, a zany road trip packed with Black ghosts from white western history; Blonde Roots, a satire that reverses the power dynamics of the slave trade; and a novella called Hello Mum, about a 14-year-old boy growing up on a council estate, followed. All her novels deal with the African diaspora in some way, mixing history, stylistic experimentalism and humour. 'I'm always going for the difficult stories and to be subversive,' she says. 'I'm always looking to find original ways into what I'm writing about.' Mr Loverman 'felt like a taboo subject'. Much has been written about the Windrush generation, but no stories that she knew of told a love story between two elderly Caribbean men. When it was first published, she was told it was 'too niche' to be adapted for television, because its protagonist, Barrington Jedidiah Walker, 'was Black, old and gay'. While her reputation was steadily building, sales were not. She wouldn't even look at her royalty statements when they arrived each year. Then, finally, her much-manifested breakthrough came. With Girl, Woman, Other she set out 'to explore as many Black women in a single novel as possible', ranging in age from 19 to 93, all with different backgrounds, faiths, sexualities and classes. Amma, a lesbian playwright, is clearly a version of Evaristo's younger self. Once again, in a style she calls 'fusion fiction', she plays fast and loose with punctuation in favour of the rhythms of speech and thought. Here are the monologues of the silenced women Evaristo wrote for the theatre all those years ago. Her Booker win coincided with a long-overdue effort to make publishing more inclusive. 'George Floyd,' she says, when I ask what she thinks was the catalyst for this change. 'There was already an awareness of it, but definitely the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter was a turning point.' Where once she knew every writer of colour in publishing, and could count them on one hand, she says, today she can't keep up. 'Identity politics has always existed,' she says of today's culture wars. 'We just didn't name it that.' Last year, she wrote a piece in the Guardian refuting the 'false allegations' against the RSL and the rumours that she had swept in with 'radical' new measures for appointing fellows, sidelining older, more established names. 'It's a great honour and a privilege,' she says mischievously when I press her for more. 'There's always this argument that if things diversify, standards are dropped.' Evaristo even manages to bring positive thinking to our current global predicament. 'Every decade, we are evolving. From my childhood to today, we have evolved,' she says. 'We can't do anything about America, but we can put up a fight in this country.' Of all these achievements, what makes her most proud? 'I feel I can enjoy the successes I've had of late,' she replies without hesitation, 'because I know I haven't kept it to myself.' Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the Women's prize outstanding contribution award.
Daily Mail
12 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Salman Rushdie warns people are 'too eager to prohibit speech they disapprove of' as acclaimed author cautions against 'slippery slope' of cancel culture
Salman Rushdie has railed against those who attack free speech as he hit out at those that were 'too eager' to slap down voices they disapprove of. The Satanic Verses author, 77, warned of the 'very slippery slope' of cancel culture and urged to 'trust the audience to be able to make up their own minds'. Sir Salman issued the stark statement last week at the Hay Festival in Wales. In comments reported by The Observer, when asked about free speech, the Indian-born British author declared: 'I'm in favour of it.' And he also posed a question about the Lucy Connolly case, the wife of Conservative councillor Ray Connolly, who was handed a 31-month sentence after admitting posting an online rant about migrants hours after killer Axel Rudakubana murdered three young girls on July 29 last year. 'Here in Britain, we have the Race Relations Act, which makes it against the law to make racist statements. In the United States, there is the power of the First Amendment, which is why American racists are able to openly say what they have to say, and they're not prosecuted. 'The question is: which do you prefer?,' Sir Salman said. The 42-year-old former childminder deleted her post after four hours, but was arrested in August and pleaded guilty to a charge of inciting racial hatred in October. Mrs Connolly deleted her post and blamed it on 'a moment of extreme outrage and emotion' when she was acting on 'false and malicious' information She last month lost her appeal against her sentence, meaning she faces serving another eight months behind bars. It sparked a free speech row with Donald Trump ally and political commentator Charlie Kirk saying he was going to raise Connolly's case with the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Sir Salman last month said he was 'over' the horrific knife attack which left him blind in one eye after his attacker was jailed for 25 years. Hadi Matar, 27, was sentenced for attempted murder after he repeatedly stabbed the author on stage during a lecture in New York in 2022. Sir Salman recently told Radio 4's Today programme that he was 'pleased' the man who set out to kill him had received the maximum possible prison sentence. But he wishes to move on from the terrifying ordeal and focus on his new book coming out later this year. He also highlighted the ever increasing role AI is playing in society, and warned authors would be 'screwed' if the technology ever learned how to write a funny book. Speaking at the Hay Festival, he said: 'The machine can absorb a million jokes but it can't make one up, because you only get a version of the million old jokes. Hadi Matar, 27, was sentenced last month to 25 years for attempted murder after he repeatedly stabbed the author on stage during a lecture in New York in 2022 'Unfortunately, however, this thing learns very fast.' The award-winning Midnight's Children writer was left blind in one eye in the knife attack, had damage to his liver and was paralysed in one hand caused by nerve damage to his arm. The event had tight security, with sniffer dogs and bag searches. Once Sir Rushdie entered the stage to an audience of applause, he joked: 'I can't see everyone - but I can hear them.' Although he said he felt 'excellent' he added there 'were bits of me that I'm annoyed about, like not having a right eye. But on the whole, I've been very fortunate and I'm in better shape than maybe I would have expected.' Last year, he published a memoir called Knife about the ordeal, which he said was his way of 'fighting back'. It comes decades after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses which made him the target of death threats as some Muslims consider blasphemous for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. A short story collection called The Eleventh Hour is set to be released by the author in November.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Telegraph
Orwell's 1984 now comes with ‘trigger warning'
George Orwell's estate has been accused of attempting to censor 1984 by adding a 'trigger warning' preface to the 75th anniversary edition of the dystopian novel. The new introductory essay describes the novel's protagonist Winston Smith as 'problematic' and warns modern readers may find his views on women 'despicable'. Critics claim the preface, written by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, an American novelist, and included in the 75th anniversary edition published in the US last year, risks undermining the work's warning against state control of thought. In 1984, citizens of the superstate Oceania are punished for subversive thoughts by the Thought Police. Now, in a real-world twist, the estate that oversees Orwell's literary legacy stands accused of ideological policing. 'We're getting somebody to actually convict George Orwell himself of thought crime in the introduction to his book about thought crime,' said Walter Kirn, a novelist and critic, on the podcast America This Week, hosted by journalist Matt Taibbi. 'We're not yet in a world where books and classic books are being excised or eliminated,' Kirn added, but warned the Orwell estate-approved edition of 1984 had been 'published with an apology for itself'. Ms Perkins-Valdez's preface is included in the anniversary edition of the 1949 classic, published by Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. In it, the award-winning novelist said she aimed to approach 1984 as a new reader, and admitted that, given the protagonist's views, she might once have abandoned the book entirely. 'I'm enjoying the novel on its own terms, not as a classic, but as a good story, that is, until Winston reveals himself to be a problematic character,' she wrote. 'For example, we learn of him: 'He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones'.' The novel follows Winston Smith, a minor bureaucrat who secretly rebels against the regime with Julia, a fellow party member. Their doomed affair is cut short when they are arrested, tortured and brainwashed into betraying one another. Although Ms Perkins-Valdez eventually concludes Orwell was portraying misogyny as a feature of totalitarianism, her comments have provoked a backlash. Her preface also takes issue with the novel's handling of race. As a black woman, she says she finds little to connect with characters in Oceania. 'The most 1984-ish thing I've read' Mr Kirn questioned the need for Ms Perkins-Valdez's introduction, pointing out the 75th anniversary edition of 1984 already included a foreword by Thomas Pynchon, one of the greatest living American novelists. 'If you have a foreword by Thomas Pynchon to a book, you don't need another foreword, right? You got maybe the greatest living novelist of our time, who's also a recluse, to come out and write something. That's all you need. 'But no, these people felt they needed an introduction before the old white man's introduction. So this version of 1984 has a trigger warning!' He called it 'the most 1984-ish thing I've ever f---ing read'. The controversy follows real-life cases of so-called 'thought crime' in Britain. In February, The Telegraph revealed that Julian Foulkes, a retired special constable, had been wrongly arrested and cautioned by Kent Police over a social media post that warned of rising anti-Semitism. Officers who raided his home commented on his 'very Brexity' bookshelves and leafed through titles including The War on the West by Douglas Murray and The Demise of the Free State by David Green. His caution has since been deleted, and he has received compensation. Last month, The Telegraph reported that Scotland Yard had charged a Jewish counter-protester for holding a placard mocking Hezbollah's leader, claiming the sign could 'distress' terrorist sympathisers. The charge was dropped after eight months. Orwell himself has not escaped modern reassessment. In 2023, his wife's biographer Anna Funder described him as 'sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent' and claimed 1984's darkness reflected the author's own. 'He desperately wants to be decent,' she told an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2023. 'But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer's flaws.' Nor is this the first time 1984 has been flagged for 'problematic' content. In 2022, the University of Northampton warned students it contained 'explicit material' that may be 'offensive and upsetting'.
