The 75-year-old, who was killed in an attack on Friday at a speech event in New York state, came into the limelight in 1981 with his second novel, “Midnight’s Children.”
The book won international acclaim and Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India.
But his 1988 book “The Satanic Verses” attracted attention beyond his imagination when it issued a fatwa, or religious edict, by an Iranian revolutionary leader calling for his death. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, The novel was considered by some Muslims to be an insult to the Prophet Muhammad.
Rushdie, who was born in India to non-practicing Muslims and is an atheist himself, was forced to go underground as a reward on his head – which remains to this day.
After the murder or attempted murder of his translators and publishers, he was provided police protection by the government in Britain, where he was in school and where he made his home.
They have spent almost a decade unable to hide, frequent homes, and tell their children where they live.
Rushdie began to emerge from his life only in the late 1990s when Iran said it would not support his assassination.
He also became a fixture on the international party circuit, appearing in films such as “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and the US television sitcom “Seinfeld”. He has been married four times and has two children.
As an advocate of freedom of expression, he launched a particularly strong defense of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, when its employees were shot by Islamists in Paris in 2015.
The magazine published pictures of Mohammed which drew sharp reactions from Muslims around the world.
“I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all should, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for freedom and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.” Rushdie Told.
“‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion’. Religion, like all other ideas, deserves criticism, satire and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”
Threats and boycotts against literary programs Rushdie attended, and his knighthood in 2007 led to protests in Iran and Pakistan, where a government minister said the honor justified suicide bombings.
The fatwa failed to suppress Rushdie’s writings, however, and inspired his memoir “Joseph Anton”, which was named after his surname while they were disguised and written in the third person.
It is one of several works of non-fiction and more than a dozen novels that Rushdie has written, as well as several short stories, many of them addressing issues of migration and post-colonialism.
Still prolific, his latest novel “Quichote” was published in 2019.
“Midnight’s Children”, which runs to over 600 pages, has been adapted for the stage and silver screen, and his books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Born in Mumbai, Rushdie attended the English boarding school Rugby before studying history at the University of Cambridge.
They initially turned to advertising, coining slogans such as “naughty but nice” for cream cakes, which became common parlance.
Rushdie has become an avid social media user in recent years, with the author saying he was glad the fatwa controversy took place in the pre-digital era.
“There was essentially no email, no text messages, no Facebook, no Twitter, no web, and that certainly slowed the attack,” he said in 2012.
He now lives in New York and his novel published in 2015 – “Two Years at Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” – is set in the city.
It is both a love letter to the metropolis and a vision of global disaster which he has compared to the rise of the Islamic State group.
“I’m really sorry that this book turned out to be true, but it happened,” he told the news channel France 24 in an interview.