Booker Prize-Winning Author Salman Rushdie to Speak at Tulane University

Internationally acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie will speak at Tulane University on Monday, April 7 at Dixon Auditorium at 7 p.m. This lecture is free and open to the public. Rushdie"s theme will be “Public Events, Private Lives: Literature and Politics in the Modern World.”

Rushdie is the celebrated author of nine novels including Midnight"s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor"s Last Sigh (1995) and Shalimar the Clown (2005). In June 2008, Random House will publish his new book, The Enchantress of Florence. His work has won a host of international awards and, in 1993, Midnight"s Children was named “the Booker of the Bookers,” the best novel published in the twenty-five year history of Britain"s prestigious Booker Prize.

After the 1988 publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie was condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini for perceived blasphemies against Islam. He spent nearly a decade underground, appearing in public only sporadically, until the fatwa was revoked by Iran. In 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for “services to literature" by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.

Rushdie"s visit to Tulane is the second in the Great Writers series sponsored by the Creative Writing Fund of the Department of English. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison was the inaugural visitor last spring. Established by an anonymous donor in 2006, the Creative Writing Fund is dedicated to enhancing Tulane"s undergraduate creative program and developing stimulating literary programming that benefits both Tulane and the New Orleans community.