British-Indian novelist and essayist, Salman Rushdie is best known for his novel Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981. He is the author of great works like Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Enchantress of Florence, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. Here are five things you did not know about the literary maestro:
1. Salman Rushdie was the son of a Cambridge-educated lawyer and a teacher and was born in Bombay, India, during the British Raj. His parents were Kashmiri Muslims. Rushdie relocated from India to study history at Cambridge University after completing high school in Warwickshire, England.
2. He became one of the most well-known authors in history with Midnight’s Children, a magical realism portrayal of a generation of supernaturally gifted kids with a mystical link to India’s own birth as an independent modern nation.
3. Despite winning numerous literary awards, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Golden PEN Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Rushdie is yet to win the Nobel Prize. 
4.Rushdie is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 for his services to literature.
5. As a former president of PEN American Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes freedom of expression and defends writers who are persecuted for their work, he is a passionate advocate for freedom of expression and has spoken out against censorship and book banning.
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Order your copy today of Salman Rushdie’s latest book Victory City. This is an epic story of a 247-year-old woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the years.
