Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie is the author of 22 books, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, including Languages of Truth. His most recent book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. In 2007, he was awarded a Knighthood for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in 2022. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a former president of PEN America and the recipient of the PEN Centenary Courage Award. His books have been translated into over forty languages. In 2023, he was awarded the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels and named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year.
From Victory City
On the last day of her life, when she was two hundred and forty-seven years old, the blind poet, miracle worker, and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga and buried it in a clay pot sealed with wax in the heart of the ruined Royal Enclosure, as a message to the future. Four and a half centuries later we found that pot and read for the first time the immortal masterpiece named the Jayaparajaya, meaning “Victory and Defeat,” written in the Sanskrit language, as long as the Ramayana, made up of twenty-four thousand verses, and we learned the secrets of the empire she had concealed from history for more than one hundred and sixty thousand days. We knew only the ruins that remained, and our memory of its history was ruined as well, by the passage of time, the imperfections of memory, and the falsehoods of those who came after. As we read Pampa Kampana’s book the past was regained, the Bisnaga Empire was reborn as it truly had been, its women warriors, its mountains of gold, its generosity of spirit and its times of mean-spiritedness, its weaknesses and its strengths. We heard for the first time the full account of the kingdom that began and ended with a burning and a severed head. This is that story, retold in plainer language by the present author, who is neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns, and who offers this version for the simple entertainment and possible edification of today’s readers, the old and the young, the educated and the not so educated, those in search of wisdom and those amused by folly, northerners and southerners, followers of different gods and of no gods, the broad-minded and the narrow-minded, men and women and members of the genders beyond and in between, scions of the nobility and rank commoners, good people and rogues, charlatans and foreigners, humble sages, and egotistical fools.
Continue reading Victory City on CBS News.
Links
- Author’s Website: Salman Rushdie
- Two nights before the attack, Salman Rushdie dreamed he was stabbed onstage on NPR 16 April 2024.
- Salman Rushdie Reflects on His Stabbing in a New Memoir in The New York Times 15 April 2024.
- Salman Rushdie’s Miracle City in The New York Times 1 February 2023.
Media
Salman Rushdie | 2021 Lannan Symposium | THIS LAND