It’s the birthday of Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie (b. 1947), whose novel Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and later won the Booker of Bookers, awarded in 1993 in honor of the Booker’s 25th anniversary, and the Best of the Booker, awarded in 2008 in honor of the Booker’s 40th anniversary, though it did not win the Golden Man Booker Prize, awarded in 2018 in honor of the Booker’s 50th anniversary, so really, how good can it be?

Booker Booker Booker.

Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India; his father was a prosperous lawyer-turned-businessman, his mother a teacher, and he had three sisters. At 13, Rushdie was sent to England for boarding school, where he had a rough time because he wasn’t “English-white” and wasn’t good at cricket. He had a much better experience at Cambridge (although his boarding school set the bar pretty low), reveling with the rest of the students in the political unrest of the 1960s. He graduated with an M.A. in history in 1968 and went into advertising, publishing a first novel, Grimus, in 1975, which novel went thunk in the literary world. Rushdie persisted and his second novel, Midnight’s Children, made his reputation internationally.

But it was Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), featuring a Muhammad-like character in a controversial light, that prompted the Ayatollah Khomeini—known to be touchy about these things—to issue a fatwa against Rushdie, thus putting a bounty on his head. Rushdie went into hiding with the help of Scotland Yard (and as much as we hate British boarding schools, we love Scotland Yard) and spent 10 years thus, a situation that made his older son’s childhood very difficult. Rushdie continued to publish novels, and in 1998 the Iranian government, those crazy so-and-sos, said, “Eh, never mind,” and revoked the fatwa. Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, describes his life during those years of hiding.

Rushdie has four ex-wives and two sons. You sort it out. The title of his second most recent novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 2015, is a reference to The Thousand and One Nights and sounds like a fascinating spin-off of that classic.

(Rushdie may have had a bounty on his head for years but I bet he never tried to get any writing done while Scooby Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur was blaring two feet from his work space because his eight year old was home from school with strep. Then again, maybe he did. It would be interesting to know.)

Have a fantastic Wednesday and stay scrupulously to the data.