Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, the most controversial author of the contemporay modern English literature has a new novel slated for release in early 2023.
Author of the booker prize-winning 'Midnight’s Children', India-born British-American writer Rushdie, has just secured a deal that will see his new novel 'Victory City', released in Australia in early 2023, and concurrent release in the US by Random House, UK by Jonathan Cape, and Canada by Knopf Canada on February 7, 2023.
His new novel Victory City has been announced as a translation of an ancient Indian myth, and follows the story of “a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries.”
Michal Shavit, Publishing Director at Jonathan Cape has shared, 'Victory City’ is a tale for indian mythology in modern narrative. Brilliantly styled as a translation of an ancient epic, this is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling. And at its heart, a true heroine, Pampa Kampana, who sets out to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. This is a stunningly beautiful, lyrical, and gripping novel about power and the hubris of those in power.
Salman Rushdieis an Indian-born British-American novelist and essayist with huge popularity and controversy as well. His work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent.
Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on 19 June 1947 during the British Raj, into an Indian Kashmiri Muslim family. He is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge-educated lawyer-turned-businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher. Anis Ahmed Rushdie was dismissed from the Indian Civil Services (ICS) after it emerged that the birth certificate submitted by him had changes to make him appear younger than he was. Rushdie has three sisters and he wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of the great Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd).
Rushdie grew up in Bombay and was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort, South Bombay before moving to England from India to attend the Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, and then King's College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.
After graduating from Cambridge, Rushdie briefly lived with his family in Pakistan (who had moved there from Bombay, India), before moving permanently to the UK.
Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1979). He left her in the mid-'80s for the Australian writer Robyn Davidson, to whom he was introduced by their mutual friend Bruce Chatwin. His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1997). In 2004, he married Padma Lakshmi, an Indian-American actress, model, and host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on 2 July 2007.
Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family but is now an atheist. In a 2006 interview with PBS, Rushdie called himself a "hardline atheist". In 1989, in an interview following the fatwa, Rushdie said that he was in a sense a lapsed Muslim, though "shaped by Muslim culture more than any other", and a student of Islam. In another interview the same year, he said, "My point of view is that of a secular human being. I do not believe in supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu."
In 1990, he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam made by characters in his novel, and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world.