Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven previous novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, and Luka and the Fire of Life. Published in 1981, Midnight’s Children is the only book to have ever won more than one Booker: It was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993 by two separate panels of judges, and it won the Best of the Booker Prize by a public vote in 2008. Rushdie is also the author of East, West, a collection of short stories, and three works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, and Step Across This Line, and the co-editor of two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, was published in 2012 and became an internationally acclaimed bestseller. It was called “the finest new memoir to cross my desk in many a year” by Jonathan Yardley and praised as “a harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document” by Michiko Kakutani. His books have been translated into over forty languages.

Knighted in 2007 for his services to literature, he has received, among many distinctions, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), Germany’s Author of the Year Award, the Budapest Grand Prize, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Commandeur), France’s highest artistic honor, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the European Union’s Aristeion Literary Prize. He is a Library Lion of the New York Public Library and the most recent winner (in 2014) of the Hans Christian Andersen Prize in Denmark. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and currently serves as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and seven American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and is a former University Distinguished Professor at Emory University.